Highway

Kazakhstan

1999

57 Min

Color

Kazakh

Currently 4.4/5 Stars.
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SOUND Sergei Dvortsevoy, Gulsara Mukatayeva, Misty Conn

Synopsis

The highway of the title refers to a 2,000 mile stretch of dirt road in remote Kazakhstan. Along this route a traveling family circus journeys in their crowded hand-cranked bus, stopping in villages to perform feats of strength and skill. The filmmaker accompanies the Tadjibajevs, capturing their quarrels, performances, and intimate domestic moments. Observing their daily life in all of its routine and mystery, Dvortsevoy creates “a testament to the magical power of film to transport the onlooker into other lives and distant lands, to kindle contemplation, offer perspective and excite with the poetic beauty of exotic images” (Lawrence Van Gelder). —Harvard Film Across

Director

Sergei Dvortsevoy

Sergey Dvortsevoy (born in 1962) worked as an aviation engineer before studying film in Moscow in the early 1990s. His films immediately garnered international acclaim, receiving prizes and recognition at festivals around the world, including the nomination of Bread Day (1998) for the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival. The following year his work was presented at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an institution dedicated to Flaherty’s adherence to the goal of seeing and depicting the human condition. Dvortsevoy’s documentaries are committed to observational filmmaking. His subjects — people living in and around a Russia in transition — try in their individual ways to eke out an existence. Tulpan is his first fiction film, which has been nominated into the 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards for Best Feature Film and Best Achievement in Directing. —Wikipedia