Feature film
Land of the Fathers
Земля отцов
Shaken Aimanov · 1966
Synopsis
An old Kazakh and his grandson Bayan take the train to Russia: they are going to fetch the body of the son, a soldier who fell during the Second World War, to bury him in the land of the ancestors. The journey crosses the whole country, and at each stage encounters confront the old man and the child with other languages and other customs; along the way, the grandson takes the measure of what the country and his own people are worth.
Context
The screenplay is by Olzhas Suleimenov, and the cinematography by the director's own son, Murat Aimanov; Eluybai Umurzakov plays the old man. According to the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, the first script showed the deportation of peoples under Stalin, which the censors cut. Made under the Soviet regime, the film opens on an epitaph in Arabic and asserts a Kazakh identity, the steppe, the river and the dombra; Peter Rollberg sees in it Aimanov's best film and a classic of Kazakh cinema, despite a commercial failure of about six million admissions that the filmmaker experienced as a catastrophe. The Festival des 3 Continents screened it in 2001.
Who it is for
About an hour and a half, in black and white, in Russian and Kazakh. A grave, restrained journey, accessible without knowing anything about Kazakhstan.
Prizes and reception
State Prize of the Kazakh SSR in 1968; shown at Nantes in 2001 and restored in a new print by the film archive of the University of California.
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