
Zhanna Issabayeva
Directing
Biography
Zhanna Issabayeva (Kazakh: Жанна Исабаева; born 1 January 1968; Almaty) is a Kazakh film director, screenwriter and producer. She graduated from the journalism faculty of Kazakh States University in 1991. She has worked as a producer and director since 1993. In 2007 debuted with the full-length feature film Karoy (2007) which took part in Venice Film Festival, "Critics Week" and was nominated for "Best Asian Director 2007" at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
Known For
The action of the series takes place in Almaty and the surrounding area of the city. Criminals of all stripes often hide in the huge human flow, and some of them are convinced that their atrocities will go unpunished. As a rule, these are the most sophisticated in methods, dodgy criminals, whose cases are shelved under the heading “unsolvable". But it is from this shelf that the cases of the Special Purpose Police Department are taken out. This department is just being formed and the heroes of the series will have to go through a thorny path of acquaintance and lapping with each other. They will deal exclusively with the most complicated, the most complicated cases.
Special Purpose Department
About the fate of a guy convicted of a murder he didn't commit. In Askhat prison, special services recruit and introduce him into a criminal group. To complete the task and survive in the criminal world for Askhat becomes the very price of freedom...
Price of Freedom

A young filmmaker travels across Asia to document independent women directors, but their stories bring her own past to the surface.
Framing Her

The film contains 13 different short stories about the first sexual experience. This is a mosaic of various feelings, emotions, joys and sufferings of young and not so young heroes. Our heroes are looking for and finding their love in different places: at students' classes, at the workplace, at the club, they get acquainted through their parents. They all crave a real relationship, but not everyone gets what they want.
Losing Innocence in Alma-Ata

Suddenly laid off from a factory staffed by deaf-mute people, Sveta’s house loan pushes her into a highly unethical line of work.
Sveta

Ugly, illiterate and an uncommunicative “graduate” of the city orphanage, Nagima is a young woman whose life offers little potential for success or even happiness. Nagima rents a tiny room on the outskirts of the city of Almaty with her fellow orphanage “graduate” the pregnant, and equally isolated, Anya. In the midst of giving birth to her child, tragedy strikes and Anya dies. Never knowing her mother, the newborn girl must be submitted to the orphanage and so Nagima sees the vicious cycle of life in repetitious action and becomes severely depressed at the cruelty of life.
Nagima

A dramatic comedy about a pathological liar from Kazakhstan.
Karoy

Teenager Ruslan is a half-orphan who lives by the dried Aral Sea. When he learns that due to serious illness he has no more than 3 months to live, Ruslan decides to punish those responsible for the death of his beloved mother.
Bopem

Amidst the plains of the Kazakhstan steppes lives a mother and Eldon, the youngest of her five grown-up children. Whilst his four siblings have all married and left home, he and his mother live a simple, traditional existence. However when Eldon announces he has met the love of his life, his mother embarks on a tour of her four other children's homes in search of money for the wedding. As we follow the lovable but demanding mum through the four very different lives, we get a heartwarming family comedy that brilliantly contrasts modern-day and traditional life in Kazakhstan with humor and insight.
My Dear Children

Nineteen-year-old young man Azat moves from the village to Almaty to work as a bricklayer at a construction site in the brigade of his older brother. But his brother is delayed in the mountains on the construction of another object, and Azat is forced to spend several days alone without housing and money in a big city. One event, in which the young man is a direct participant, will determine his fate.
Fate

The main character of the film, 11-year-old Talgat, lives on the outskirts of Alma-Ata in a dysfunctional family that consists of alcoholic parents, six-year-old sister Guli and mentally ill uncle Nurik. Talgat goes to school, earns money, does household chores, takes care of Gul and his uncle, and also manages to enjoy the company of his best friends.
Talgat

This is the story of a young woman, Aiganym, who was born into the Orthodox Kazakh family from the South of Kazakhstan. When she was a student at the college in the capital city of Kazakhstan, she gave birth to a boy. Right after giving birth, her family cursed her and rejected her and her newborn son because she was a single mother. After seven years, Timur, her son, was not able to accomplish his homework assignment “to draw a family tree”. Aiganym decides to return to her parents’ house, so that her son has a big family. Regardless of the fact that each time, she wants to return, her eldest brother beats her up, she keeps on returning home again and again…