Gulmira Aprymova

Little Brother

Yerken is nine years old and lives alone in a remote village in the mountains. When his older brother returns after a long absence, the young boy’s heart leaps with joy. But it doesn’t last long, his older brother has become a cold and heartless person… Serik Aprymov was born in 1960 in Kazakhstan and studied film at the Moscow Film School (VGIK). Along with other young directors from his country, he became part of the “new wave” of Kazakh cinema. At the Locarno Film Festival in 2004, he presented Okhotnik (The Hunter), in which a young boy suffers the contrast between the traditions of his people now on the decline and the progress of an increasingly urbanized new society.

The Hunter

In an isolated village in the Kazakhstan mountains, Erken, a boy of 12, lives with his mother, a beautiful and alluring single woman. One night, when the mother is visited by a hunter, Erken steals the latters horse and his gun to hold up a shop. Sought by the police, he is found by the hunter who gives him a choice: to go to prison or to go and live with him in the mountains. Thus begins a voyage of initiation, in the course of which the hunter tries to pass on his taste for and understanding of life.

Three Brothers

"Three brothers live in a small village somewhere in Kazakhstan. Nearby is the small station, where an elderly man, who has had the nickname Klein since he was in a concentration camp in the Second World War, rules the roost. ... The children ask inquisitively about the nature of his activities, as nothing seems to happen. He tells them that he supplies a local military base with material. Klein starts telling them different stories, for instance about the beautiful lake where the officers spend their spare time and where life is as beautiful as the women. The picture he sketches of this lake is so attractive to the three brothers and their friends that they resolve to go there. They know from the old man that it will cost money, because life is dear. Tri brata is not a children's film, but a fairy-tale about today's world with its military aircraft on one side and an elderly man with his railway material on the other." - IFFR

Aksuat

A Kazakh villager has to take care of his pregnant sister-in-law after his brother is thrown in jail.