Nariman Turebayev

This program features three digital short films by Asian filmmakers. Singapore veteran filmmaker Eric Khoo's NO DAY OFF (39 min) records the life of a maid who leaves her husband and baby for Singapore. Darezhan Omirbayev's ABOUT LOVE (38 min) is a bitter love story based on Anton Chekhov's novel, in which a lonely math teacher falls in love with her married university classmate. Pen-ek Ratanaruang's TWELVE TWENTY (30 min) depicts the encounters of a man and a woman on a long haul flight, where they spend the next twelve hours and twenty minutes reading, drinking, eating and watching movies and sleeping by each other's side, as if they are a married couple.

A lyrical serene drama dedicated to love and loneliness

Marat is single, lives alone and works as a security guard. He lives his lonely life according to a never changing boring daily routine. Then, one day, something unusual happens. Marat sees a girl standing in the street near his house. The next day she reappears. The girl is called Mariyam and when she accidentally enters Marat’s life, his nights are turned into adventures.

A full-length feature film that consists of five short stories connected by the main characters who live next door in a five-story house. In fact, the future film is a kind of slice of our time, because it tells about modern life, about people living in today's Kazakhstan. The stories told in the novels are recognizable and understandable to every viewer. The themes that the directors touch on in their plots: love, disappointments.

Kairat, a teacher of mathematics, accidentally meets Aslar, along with whom he studied in university. Askar invites him to his home, where Kairat becomes acquainted with Togzhan, the wife of Askar. And he falls in love with her. Though this love was mutual, they couldn't step over the obstacles already made by their lives. Their emotions delayed. The script is based on the novel by Chekhov's About Love, Gooseberry.

The film "She Bought a Kettle" vividly portrays the life drama of a girl named Aynur from the outskirts of Almaty. Subjected to violence and having lost faith in men, she is forced to abandon her previous life and job due to harassment. Now working as a home hairdresser, she struggles to find her own independence amidst poverty and solitude.

Little Men is about two sympathetic losers with good looks, about groovy tunes and dry slapstick humour.

Sunny Days is an account of five days in the life of its protagonist, who, during this brief period of time, is trying to find money to pay off his debts.

Eighteen-year-old Rustem, unlike his business sister Madina, is lazy and inert, he looks at the world with cold eyes, hiding behind indifference and cruelty to others. Strange girl Miko timidly tries to destroy Rustem's "shell" with a fragile feeling of first love.

A young man aged about twenty chooses a beautiful woman to make love to her for money. It is not really his style and a couple of hours later he is even more lonely than he was before... He is probably dreaming of something very different from what he does. The title says it all. Shot in a slow and realistic style, entirely in the line of modern Kazakh cinema.

This is a story about a boy who is going through a divorce of his parents.

He used to be one of the biggest authorities in his country. But he lost everything and was forced to escape. And now he needs to go through just one night in Paris, in a cramped apartment, in order to go to his son the next morning. Being frightened, he decides to call his best and almost forgotten friend. And this night seems to be very long.

Driven by the pain of losing a loved one, not to mention the all-pervasive injustice and abuse of power that surrounds him, a lone individual resorts to vigilante justice.