The Recruiter

A Kazakh settlement at the beginning of the 1990s. A 15-year-old boy whom everyone calls Schizo lives with his mother and, on the whole, gets on well with her current partner. He works for a gang which organises fistfights and earns money betting. The prize is a battered Mercedes. One day Schizo brings one of his relatives to fight. To everyone’s surprise he wins, drives off in the Mercedes and soon sells it. All hell breaks loose: the mafia want either the car or their money back, and they go after his foster father to get it.

Director Guka Omarova had help writing her feature debut from Sergei Bodrov, whose Prisoner of the Mountains won the Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe in 1996. Bodrov’s talent for authentically reproducing environment and character unquestionably helped the novice director, and allowed her to concentrate on the portrait of a boy whose originality may provoke a scornful jeer from those around him, but who in reality undertakes a meaningful passage from adolescent thoughtlessness to manly responsibility. –Karlovy Vary