Premiered at the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes 2001
Wheelchair accessible, English subtitles, SDH captions, Pay-what-you-can tickets (£0-£8)
Kazakh film critic and scholar Gulnara Abikeyeva considers The Road — Darezhan Omirbayev’s metacinematic reflection on the painful anxieties and self-aggrandizing delusions of film directing — to be the last film of the Kazakh New Wave. Its protagonist Amir Kobessov (played by famous Tajik director Jamshed Usmonov) is an acclaimed art cinema director and an unfaithful, lying husband who finds out about his mother’s illness and drives to visit her in rural Kazakhstan. On the long road, he daydreams about his failures, fears, and longings encountering a set of surreal characters in the blurry space between dream and reality. The Road is a mixture of a road-movie and a film about film (many compare it to Fellini’s 8 1/2), and its main character — a darker mirror-image of Omirbayev himself, discombobulated by the unexpected success of his latest feature, Killer.
Content notes: sex, partial nudity, sexual harassment.
Curated by Anisa Sabiri