Feature film
Surzhekey: Angel of Death
Сұржекей — өлім періштесі
Damir Manabaev · 1991
Synopsis
A Kazakh village in the early 1930s. Azbergen returns to his family to warn them of the collectivization that is coming, without convincing them; Surzhekey, known as Jake, arrives, a drunken and brutal representative of Soviet power, who seizes the livestock and distributes food as he pleases. The teacher Majan is deported and shot, famine sets in, it first takes the animals, then the men, and the community falls apart in a country where forced sedentarization has taken from the nomads their only means of living.
Context
The screenplay is by the writer Smagul Yeluybayev and the filmmaker, the cinematography by Bolat Suleyev, the music by Adil Bestybayev, for a production by the Katarsis company. Alternating colour and black and white, spoken in Kazakh, the film was released in 1991, the year of independence, and brings to the screen the famine born of collectivisation and the seizure of herds, which it was forbidden to speak of under the previous regime. An American academic review notes its final images, a teapot and a cradle that the sand covers, as a call to recognise the suffering of the Kazakh people.
Who it is for
Two hours twenty, in Kazakh with subtitles. It helps to know that this famine followed the forced settlement of nomads, deprived of their herds.
Prizes and reception
The film was presented in 2021 at the New East Cinema symposium of the University of Pittsburgh, among the founding works of Kazakh cinema of the independence era.
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