World premiere
The Land Where Winds Stood Still - Critics' Picks Competition Winner 2023
Windy steppes of Kazakhstan. Starving people ravenously eat donkeys and their weaker comrades. Frantic, raw, gripping, and cannibalistic western inspired by testimonies of the historical Great Famine of the 1930s. Ruthless Jupar with her two boys Jolan and Boshay runs for survival to reach her childhood village with hopes to find living relatives. A mother with no tears to cry endures rains, sandstorms, feverish famine, poisoned crops, hungry vultures, rotten meat, and greedy betrayals. Jupar will have to steal, cut throats, and protect her and others’ children to witness fates worse than death.
Nearly four million Kazakhs lived in Kazakhstan around 1926, but brutal Soviet collectivization resulted in the genocide of more than one million citizens until 1937.
Edvinas Pukšta
Ardak Amirkulov (1977) graduated from the Kazakh Pedagogical Institute. After that, he studied film at Moscow’s All-Soviet State Institute of Cinematography (currently known as VGIK) under filmmaker S. Solovyov. He graduated in 1988. Since then, he has directed and produced several feature films. From 1992 to 2002, Amirkulov worked as a general director of Kazakhstan’s leading film studio – Kazakhfilm. In 1996, he became a professor in film theory at Kazakh National Academy of Arts. Since 2022, he has served as the President of the Eurasia Film Festival.
Filmography:
Gibel Otrara (The Fall of Otrar, 1991), Abai (1995), Zapisi Rustema s kartinkami (1997), Qosh bol, Gulsary! (Goodbye, Gulsary!, 2008), V bezmolvii (In Silence, 2018), The Surgeon (2021), Zhel toqtaghan zher (The Land Where Wind Stood Still, 2023)