Veteran filmmaker offers his take on Soviet-era famine 

A new film by Ardak Amrkulov about the Soviet-era famines in Kazakhstan is the latest artistic attempt to make sense of the nation’s biggest 20th century tragedy.  

The veteran filmmaker hints that to heal our traumatised psyche we need to go back to our traditional mythology. 

Erased from the official history books, Asharshylyq (famine in Kazakh) was a taboo topic in the Soviet period. Its victims were forced to suppress memories of their horrific experiences.  

Slowly we are finding the courage to acknowledge and face Asharshylyq.  

It is an extremely hard and raw subject to handle in a film. How do you find the right tone? How do you deal with the tremendous pressure of responsibility? 

Amrkulov chose to shoot the film, “Jel Toqtagan Jer” (“The Land Where the Wind Stops”), in monochrome, he said, “to immerse the viewer in the atmosphere of those times, so they subconsciously perceive it as an old documentary film”.  

The main protagonist is Jupar, who with her two young sons is travelling on foot to Siberia at the time of the famine to find her husband exiled there by the Bolsheviks. 

We follow her journey through a steppe turned into a giant graveyard, with ghost-like emaciated people taking their last halting steps before dropping dead.   

Amid this helplessness and despair, with all the old structures of life and support gone, Jupar is collected, fearless and resolute, which is not how she used to be. The disaster transforms her, bringing out new hidden traits.  

Her sons cannot recognise her. “You have gone mad,” says one of them. 

It is as if in the face of danger to herself and her children, Jupar manages to connect to the spirits of our ancestors, to the past, when we knew who we were and knew our way around our own environment.  

The film is full of allusions to national myths.  

There is a scene in which Jupar saves the communist Baymukhan from a well, as if bringing him up to the earth from the lower chthonian level, thus opening the door to the ensuing calamities. 

In another scene, Jupar encounters an old woman — an allusion to Jalmauyz Kempir (a witch in Kazakh fairytales) – who hides her evil intentions behind fake kindness. Did not the Bolsheviks come with a promise of liberation and justice?   

And finally, Jupar’s story clearly alludes to the legend about a she-wolf who adopts and raises a child, the last surviving member of a tribe, who grows up and founds a new tribe. 

Note: The Kazakh famines were caused by the Soviet policies of forces sedentarisation and collectivisation in the 1920s and 1930s. According to various estimates they killed between 1.4m and 4m Kazakhs and caused hundreds of thousands more to flee to China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran and other countries. Some in Kazakhstan believe Asharshylyq should be recognised as genocide.  

Amrkulov is known for his films “Proschay Gulsary” (“Good Bye Gulsary”), 2008, and “Gibel Otrara” (“The End of Otrar”), 1991.  

By Zemfira Yerzhan 

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