From Almaty to Moscow and Paris, filmmaker and editor Rinat Bekchintaev has built a creative identity shaped by movement, memory and displacement. In this interview with Novastan, he discusses Almaty’s cinematic power, his relationship with Kazakhstan, his work on films such as Salarié oriental, Crypto Rush and JOQTAU, and the independent cinema community he is helping to build in France.

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From Almaty to Paris

Novastan : You studied in Almaty and then continued your studies at the Moscow School of New Cinema. What did Almaty give you as a filmmaker, visually, emotionally or intellectually?

Rinat Bekchintaev: Listen, Almaty is simply an unbelievably cool place. I can talk for hours about how cinematic this city is. It has its own distinctive, authentic vibe, its own tone. There is a kind of noir quality on foggy days, and the mountains, of course, create this “wall of the horizon”. But the most important thing is the people, they are very open and responsive. I am still in touch with my friends from Almaty, and I collaborate with people connected to cinema and the visual arts.

Read also on Novastan: Que sont devenues les premières salles de cinéma du Kazakhstan-Oriental ?

And of course, I dream of making not just one film in Kazakhstan, and in Almaty in particular. For example, I am currently at the development stage of a film called I Want to Be a Geologist Like My Father, a film about how ecological trauma becomes part of collective memory and continues to exist in people and landscapes decades after the disaster itself.

I studied engineering at Almaty University of Power Engineering and Telecommunications (AUPET) for five years, then took screenwriting courses at the Open Literary School. At the time, it did not seem important to me, as is usually the case. But after several years, I realized that it had given me a very important impulse to take up cinema.

Your biography is linked to several geographies: Sevastopol, Almaty, Moscow, Paris. How do these places coexist in your creative identity?

Yes, I have quite a complex, nomadic path. Sevastopol and Crimea are the most difficult starting point for me, and I think I still have to reflect on this original point of my journey. I don’t know, my mother took me away from there to Almaty when I was very young. I spent my entire conscious life in Almaty, and perhaps the only thing I can identify myself as now is an Almaty person, strange as that may sound.

Moscow also gave me a lot that was very important. It was part of my formation, an education at the Moscow School of New Cinema that mattered a lot to me, and people with whom I am still in contact.

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I have not been in Paris for very long, and it is probably difficult to speak about it yet, but again, it is another chapter: new people, a new language, everything new. But I try to continue creating interaction with reality, with people and institutions. We created an association of independent filmmakers, K1NO1 (Kino 11), wrote a manifesto, organize screenings and discussions in Paris, and run a Telegram channel. Anyone can join the community, participate in events and so on. There is a website, Instagram and Telegram. In general, we are creating a kind of community, and it is international, not only made up of immigrants. I think this is important. I don’t know, at first glance it all looks like chaos, but I think it all mixes quite well in my ghostly creative identity.

Do you consider yourself a Central Asian filmmaker, a post-Soviet filmmaker, a filmmaker in exile, or do such definitions seem too limiting to you?

Perhaps for a career it is useful to manifest oneself in some way along these lines, but I do not think I would really manage to do that. I think all these labels coexist within me.

Has your perception of Kazakhstan, Central Asia or the post-Soviet space changed since moving to France?

Before moving to France, I came to Kazakhstan. I had not been in my native Almaty for about five years. And I was absolutely delighted. It seemed to me that everything was developing very well. Again, forgive me for being so complimentary, but I truly think that Kazakhstan is not stagnating at all, in any respect, and in the field of art, definitely not. After moving to France, I think it was only here that I began seriously considering the possibility of making a feature film in Kazakhstan. Perhaps the outside view is very important for me.

Note from Novastan: Bekchintaev’s work moves between directing and editing, fiction and documentary, personal stories and broader social questions. His filmography includes Salarié oriental (Vostochny rabochy), a short fiction film shaped by migration, labour and emotional distance; editing work on Crypto Rush, a documentary on the rise of cryptocurrency; and collaborations on Kazakhstani films such as Aruan Anartay’s JOQTAU and Dreams of the Sky Mausoleum.

Your films and artistic universe

One of your early fiction films, Salarié oriental (Vostochny rabochy), follows a story of emotional distance shaped by class, language and migration. Even its title seems to raise questions of labour, identity and perhaps irony. What story did you want to tell in this film?

The story in this film is simple: the impossibility of love because of class, language and other differences. But that is my interpretation now, ten years after the premiere. Perhaps at the time it was different. And of course, I believe that everyone should identify something for themselves in it. That, it seems to me, is the power of cinema.

I am also very glad that this film was once shown in Almaty, at the Arman cinema, the first cinema I ever visited in my life.

How did the idea for Salarié oriental come about, and what does this title mean to you?

The idea for the film came to my co-author Egor Shevchenko in a dream. After that, we developed it very seriously, and a lot came from reflecting on my perception of Moscow, as I had only just arrived there to study at the time.

The title appeared by chance. The sound designer named the folder with the files that way, we noticed it and immediately fixed it for ourselves. Before that, I do not even remember what the working title was.

You also worked as an editor on Crypto Rush, a documentary exploring the world of cryptocurrency across several countries and protagonists. What attracted you to this topic, and what did editing a film about such an abstract and global phenomenon teach you?

I was the editor on this film. It was a very important experience. We worked very closely with the director. At the time, she was very deeply immersed in the subject, and she had a very global project: several countries, protagonists and so on. In general, the most important thing was that we managed to combine a cinematic image and an informational one in this film. And I also learned a little more about crypto and so on.

Among your editing works is a movie connected to Kazakhstan, Aruan Anartay’s JOQTAU, rooted in Kazakhstani stories, landscapes and visual imagination. What attracts you to films shaped by this geography and cinematic world?

I think Kazakhstan has that authentic cinematic image that has enormous potential. This image consists of many elements, and it cannot be repeated anywhere else in the world.

JOQTAU is a film by my friend Aruan Anartay, and it is one of those examples where this image was captured. We searched for solutions for this film for a long time, and in the end, during editing, we found certain approaches that helped us bring this image out.

Directing, editing and cinematic language

You are both a director and an editor. Does working with editing make you a more disciplined director?

Yes, absolutely. As a director, I understand the editing process and try to make it less costly. In general, I believe that a contemporary director should be able to edit, shoot and work with sound themselves too.

Editing often remains invisible to the viewer, but it largely shapes the emotion and meaning of a film. In your view, what makes editing good?

It is not only about comfortable cuts, but about building the structure of the film, as well as creating refrains and syntagms. This happens almost entirely at the editing table. Not to mention rhythm and the flow of time. Sometimes a film comes together during editing, and this is not only my opinion.

Also read on Novastan: Le cinéma kazakh à l’honneur : retour sur la sixième édition du Festival du film kazakh à Paris

When you direct, do you already “edit” the film in your head during shooting, or do you try to leave space for discovery at the editing stage?

Yes, I do actually already edit in my head, and this gives me the opportunity to do fewer identical takes and shoot more variations of a scene. I felt this when I was shooting my film Gobelin, one of my own fiction projects.

What usually comes to you first: an image, a character, a place or a conflict?

Some kind of phenomenon or life situation appears first, or some place, or a figure, I don’t know, something that creates a sustained interest in exploring it. That is the starting point for a film.

What faces, landscapes, pauses or gestures attract your camera?

Those that transmit either vitality or a hauntological feeling.

Paris, emigration and artistic transformation

What are the main difficulties faced by a filmmaker who arrives in Paris without previous professional connections, a familiar linguistic environment or the usual film-production system?

Yes, there are many problems. First of all, not being embedded in the environment, the lack of connections, and the language too. That is probably the most difficult part, but I am trying to move in that direction. There is no shortage of ideas, and the film-production system is more or less clear.

Does emigration provide artistic freedom, or does it primarily create practical constraints?

Both. An outside view always gives a new lens on reality. Also, the reality around me is new to me, so one way or another I find interest in it. As for practical constraints, they always exist, and emigration intensifies them. It is difficult, but in my view not fatal.

Kazakhstan and Central Asian cinema

Which Kazakhstani or Central Asian filmmakers should French-speaking audiences know more about?

Aruan Anartay, a Kazakhstani director, screenwriter and producer whose debut feature JOQTAU brought a poetic, documentary-inflected vision of the Kazakh steppe to international festivals; and Katerina Suvorova, an Almaty-born documentary filmmaker known for Sea Tomorrow, which premiered at Locarno’s Critics’ Week, and for her work on Mediastan.

Which of your films would you advise Novastan readers to start with, and why?

They can watch Vostochny rabochy / Salarié oriental here.

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Interview by

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief at Novastan-English

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Dilmurad Yusupov is an Uzbekistani researcher, civil society activist and international development consultant advocating for the rights and inclusion of persons with disabilities. He co-founded NGO Sharoit Plus, a grassroots disabled people’s organisation in Tashkent, and launched IshPlus.uz, Uzbekistan’s first disability-inclusive recruitment platform. After completing a PhD in Development Studies at the University of Sussex, he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, where he further researches disability inclusion focusing on employment of persons with disabilities.

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From Economics to Disability Rights Advocacy

Novastan : You are an Uzbekistani researcher and disability rights advocate whose work has taken you from Central Asia to Europe and now Japan. How has this international journey shaped the way you understand disability, inclusion, and citizenship?

Dilmurad Yusupov : Every country I have lived in has given me a new pair of glasses and forced me to take off the previous ones. I started as an economist when I studied at MGIMO in Moscow, then did a master’s in development economics at Waseda University in Tokyo. I was initially trained to look at the world through numbers and aggregate indicators. But with my first work experience while working in Uzbekistan with Japanese international development organisations such as the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) my whole worldview has shifted entirely. I started working as JICA project assistant on disability inclusion projects along with persons with various impairments: wheelchair users, deaf men and women, parents of children with intellectual disabilities – and it struck me that no statistic was capturing what I was seeing: the humiliation at an inaccessible government office, the mother who had never left her flat in years because she had no help with her son, the university graduate who was told he could not work because his medical commission had classified him as “unemployable.”

I went to Sussex to do a PhD specifically because I needed different tools: ethnography, participatory methods, critical disability theory. And now in Tokyo, I am back in Japan, but as a researcher looking at how Japan designs employment support for persons with disabilities, trying to extract lessons for Uzbekistan. The journey has taught me one fundamental thing: disability is not a personal or medical problem. It is a social and political question. Where you are born, what kind of state you live in, whether your community sees you as a full human being – these things determine your life far more than your physical condition.

Reform Beyond the Headlines

When you look at Uzbekistan from abroad, what progress becomes more visible, and what gaps become harder to ignore?

Distance gives you a strange kind of clarity but the progress is genuinely visible. Uzbekistan has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2021. The National Agency for Social Protection and its “Inson” Social Services Centres have been established since 2023. For the last couple of years there have been new presidential decrees on employment. We have a 3% employment quota for companies with more than 20 employees, some effort to improve physical accessibility. I see more Uzbek women and men with disabilities present in public life speaking at forums, running NGOs, appearing in media. Ten years ago that was rare. The disability rights conversation has finally begun in our country as well.

But from outside, the gaps also become impossible to ignore. Boarding houses closed institutional facilities where persons with disabilities, including children and adults with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities still exist and still confine people. The medical model of disability, inherited from the Soviet era, is still dominant in how the state assesses, classifies, and relates to disabled citizens. And there is a persistent gap between legislation and lived reality that frustrates everyone working in this field. It still often feels like laws exist on paper but a wheelchair user still cannot enter their district administration building. Disabled people’s organisations and other related NGOs still lack organisational capacity to advocate for the rights of persons with disabilities and still look at the problem through charity perspectives.

Can disability rights be used as a lens to assess the depth of Uzbekistan’s broader reforms since 2016?

Absolutely, and I would argue it is one of the most revealing lenses available which I have been applying in my work a lot. The reforms of the President Shavkat Mirziyoyev era have been substantive in some domains: economic liberalisation, somewhat cautious opening of civil society and media space, increased engagement with international institutions. But reforms that only benefit people who are already relatively advantaged tell us little about the depth of transformation.

Disability inclusion tests the genuineness of reform because it requires changing entrenched institutions, not just policies. It requires breaking the paternalistic logic of Soviet social protection which assumed that the state knows best, provides a minimal subsidy, and keeps “abnormal” people out of public life. If Uzbekistan’s reforms are real, we should see deinstitutionalisation people leaving boarding houses and living independently in communities. We should see more disabled people in parliament, on advisory committees, in leadership of public institutions. We should see the disability assessment system overhauled from a purely medical examination into a needs-assessment that actually enables meaningful participation. These things have not happened yet. The reforms are real, but they are still mostly skin-deep when it comes to disability.

The Soviet Legacy Lives On

To what extent are current disability policies still shaped by Soviet-era institutions and assumptions?

Enormously. My research thesis is essentially built around this question. The Soviet system treated disability as a medical deficit as the “loss of working capacity” caused by a health condition. The response was twofold: medical rehabilitation to return people to “normal”, and segregation for those who could not be normalised. That logic shaped the entire institutional architecture: the Medical and Social Expert Commission that classifies you as a “first group”, “second group” or “third group” disabled person; the specialised boarding schools and care homes; the sheltered workshops. These institutions are still with us, physically and conceptually.

What has changed since Soviet times is that disability is now more explicitly framed in rights terms, especially post-CRPD ratification. But the assumption that disability is primarily a medical issue, something to be fixed or managed rather than accommodated is still deeply embedded in how civil servants think, how families behave, and even how disabled people themselves have been taught to understand their own lives. One of the most painful aspects of participatory research is when the person with a disability internalises that logic: “I can’t work because I’m disabled,” rather than “I can’t work because there are no accessible workplaces.”

Uzbekistan ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2021. What has changed in practice, and what remains mostly on paper?

The ratification mattered. It was a political signal, and it created a reference point that activists and DPOs can use to hold the government accountable. Some things followed: new legislation on employment support, some amendments to the law on social protection, the development of national action plans. I celebrated the ratification publicly in 2021.

But the CRPD requires a paradigm shift from the medical model to the human rights model of disability and that shift has not happened at the institutional level. The legal definition of disability in Uzbekistan still essentially conflates disability with impairment. The Medical and Social Expert Commission (MSEC) system still divides people into those who can and cannot work based on a medical assessment. There are still no independent living, services personal assistance, accessible housing, supported decision-making which the CRPD requires.

The pattern I observe is common across many countries that ratify international conventions: the ratification is real, the rhetoric changes, some laws are amended, but the deeper bureaucratic, cultural, and financial changes that would actually transform disabled people’s lives get deferred indefinitely. The CRPD is a powerful tool but only if disabled people’s organisations have the political standing, resources and access to use it. That is the real bottleneck in Uzbekistan.

Read also on Novastan: Comment les femmes handicapées sont discriminées au Tadjikistan

What Disability Reveals About Society

What does the treatment of disabled people reveal about the relationship between the state and citizens in Central Asia?

It reveals a deeply paternalistic social contract. The state’s implicit message to disabled citizens has been: “We will provide you with a modest benefit and manage your needs, but you will not be a full public subject.” That logic is not unique to disability it shapes how the state relates to many categories of citizen. But disabled people make it especially visible because they depend on state services and infrastructure so directly.

The mahalla, the neighbourhood community, institution is a fascinating case study in this. On the one hand, mahalla networks provide real informal support to disabled people and their families: a neighbour who helps with shopping, a community that knows about a child who needs assistance. On the other hand, the mahalla is also a mechanism of social control and conformity, and it can reinforce stigma and exclusion just as readily as solidarity. For disabled people, the mahalla is simultaneously a lifeline and a site of judgement.

What I find most telling is that disability allowances in Uzbekistan are set at levels that make independent living impossible. They are supplementary to family support, not substitutes for it. The entire system assumes that disabled people live with and are cared for by families. Independent living – as a right – is not a design principle of the system.

In Uzbekistan, families often play a central role in care and support. Is this a strength, a burden, or both?

Both, without any doubt and I want to resist the temptation of romanticising family solidarity without naming its costs. When there are no community-based services, no personal assistance systems, no accessible housing, families have no choice but to become the primary support system. And in that context, families do extraordinary things. I have met mothers who have spent twenty years advocating for their child’s right to education, fathers who have rebuilt their homes to make them accessible, siblings who have become unpaid carers while working full-time.

But the word “choice” matters here. When families bear this burden because there is no alternative, it is not solidarity – it is structural neglect dressed in cultural clothing. And the cost falls most heavily on women, who are by far the primary carers in Uzbekistan. A woman who spends her life caring for a disabled relative often has a very low pension, no career, no independent income, no respite. She is made invisible by a system that counts on her labour without compensating or supporting her.

The vision I work towards is not one where families abandon disabled relatives the family bond in Central Asia is real and valuable. It is one where families who choose to provide care are genuinely supported, and where disabled people who want to live independently have the services to do so. These should be choices, not compulsions.

The Unequal Burden of Exclusion

How does the experience of disability differ for women, rural residents, or persons with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities?

Every additional axis of disadvantage compounds dramatically in Uzbekistan. Let me be concrete. A woman with a physical disability in Tashkent faces barriers – but she lives in the city where Sharoit Plus and IshPlus.uz operate, where there is at least some accessible infrastructure, some specialist services, some community. A woman with a physical disability in a remote district of Surkhandarya faces all of those same barriers, plus almost no services, greater family pressure to stay at home, less information about her rights, and fewer journalists or NGOs to notice if something goes wrong.

For persons with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities, the situation is the most serious and the least visible. These are the people most likely to be in boarding houses. These are the people whose voices are least present in public consultations on disability policy. In 2024 I wrote about a case in Syrdarya where a woman with a mental disability was filmed being mocked and abused in a residential care facility – the video went viral, but what struck me was not the exceptional cruelty of one act but how unsurprising it was to anyone who knew these institutions. Closed institutions breed abuse. That is not a bug; it is a structural feature.

Work, Dignity and Belonging

You have researched disability-inclusive employment. Why is access to work such a decisive issue for equality and citizenship?

Work is not only about income, though income matters enormously as disabled people in Uzbekistan are among the poorest population groups. Work is about dignity, belonging, identity, and citizenship in the fullest sense. When you work, you are visible. You have a schedule, colleagues, a place in the social fabric. You contribute and are recognised as contributing. When you do not work when you are told by a medical commission that you are “unemployable”, or when every employer turns you away because of stereotypes about your capacity you are consigned to a kind of social invisibility.

That is why I consider the Soviet-era concept of “unemployable” so harmful. It is not a medical finding – it is a social sentence. When we launched IshPlus.uz in 2021, we were directly challenging that logic. Within a year, 50 persons with disabilities had found jobs through the platform. When we scaled up with Eurasia Foundation’s support, 130 people found employment in just six months – persons with visual impairments, hearing impairments, physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities. Behind each number is a life that changed.

Are disabled people in Uzbekistan still too often seen as recipients of assistance rather than workers, experts and decision-makers?

Yes – and this is the core cultural battle. The dominant public image of disability in Uzbekistan is still the charity model: a person in need of pity, whose story should inspire gratitude for one’s own health. That image is present in media, in how government programmes are designed, in how businesses think about the 3% quota (as a burden to be minimised rather than an opportunity). Even some disabled people’s organisations reproduce it because they have learned to navigate a system built on those assumptions.

The shift I advocate for – and that the CRPD requires – is from seeing disabled people as objects of welfare to recognising them as rights-holders, experts in their own lives and in the design of the systems that affect them. “Nothing about us without us” is the foundational principle of the global disability rights movement, and it is still quite foreign to how policymakers in Uzbekistan approach disability reform.

Learning from Abroad

What lessons from Ireland and Japan could be useful for Uzbekistan, and what should not be copied blindly?

Ireland went through a serious deinstitutionalisation process, moving persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities out of large institutions and into community-based living. The process was painful and incomplete, and Ireland is still reckoning with the abuses that occurred in those institutions – but the direction of travel was right, and it shows what is possible with political will. The Irish independent living movement also developed strong models of personal assistance and direct payments that are worth studying for Uzbekistan.

Japan is fascinating because I have lived there twice now, in very different capacities. Japan has invested heavily in physical accessibility – its cities are among the most barrier-free I have experienced, the public transport system is genuinely wheelchair accessible, and there is sophisticated legislation including the 2016 Act for Eliminating Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities. JICA has also been active in Uzbekistan on disability rehabilitation for years, and those partnerships have real value.

But Japan also teaches the lesson of what not to copy. Physical infrastructure does not automatically produce social inclusion. Japan still has very high rates of institutional care for persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities. Stigma around mental health is acute. Employment discrimination persists despite legal protections. A disabled person with perfect ramp access to a building may still encounter assumptions about their competence the moment they walk in the door. The lesson is that hardware without software – accessibility without attitude change – is not inclusion. Uzbekistan can learn the infrastructure lessons from Japan and the deinstitutionalisation lessons from Ireland, while understanding that both countries are still on an unfinished journey.

Central Asia as a Producer of Knowledge

How can Central Asian researchers contribute to global disability studies, rather than simply being treated as case studies by scholars elsewhere?

This question matters to me personally and professionally. For a long time, Central Asia was studied primarily by Western or Russian scholars, and the region’s disabled people appeared in academic literature mainly as examples – illustrations of post-Soviet transition, of Islamic culture, of development deficits. Local researchers were rarely cited as theorists or methodologists; they were cited as informants or acknowledged in footnotes.

This is a form of epistemic injustice, and it limits the quality of the scholarship itself. The theoretical tools we need to understand disability in post-Soviet Muslim majority Central Asia – the intersections of Soviet institutionalisation, Islamic notions of compassion and charity, mahalla-based informal care, rapid economic transformation – cannot be developed from a distance by someone who has never negotiated those realities.

I try to practise a different kind of research: participatory, with disabled people as co-researchers and co-authors, not just subjects. I try to publish in accessible formats in Uzbek and Russian, not only in English-language academic journals. And I try to position my work as contributing concepts and frameworks to global disability studies, not just providing data points about Uzbekistan. The ambition should be for Central Asian disability studies to produce theory, not just cases.

Read also on Novastan: Sur scène, plus de handicap

Telling Better Stories About Disability

How should journalists report on disability – and how can success stories be told without falling into pity, charity, or “inspirational” stereotypes?

This is something I think about a great deal, because bad journalism about disability does real harm. The two dominant failure modes are the pity narrative – the disabled person as tragic sufferer deserving charity – and what the disability studies scholar Stella Young called “inspiration porn” – the disabled person as a heroic overcomer, whose story is meant to make non-disabled audiences feel grateful for their own lives. Both narratives make the disabled person an object, not a subject.

Good journalism focuses on systems, not just individuals. Good journalism also asks disabled people what they think, want, and advocate for, not just how they suffer or cope. It treats them as sources of analysis and expertise, not just of emotional testimony. And it avoids language and framing that frames disability as inherently deficient – “confined to a wheelchair”, “suffers from”, “despite her disability.” These phrases embed the medical model into the grammar of every sentence.

“Nothing About Us Without Us”

What would it take for disabled people’s organisations in Uzbekistan to be involved not as consultees, but as co-authors of reform?

First, financial sustainability. Uzbekistani DPOs are chronically under-resourced. The state allocates minimal social orders to civil society, and the NGO regulatory environment creates significant administrative burdens. A DPO that spends most of its energy on survival cannot invest in policy advocacy. Dedicated, multi-year funding for DPOs – from the state and from donors – is a precondition.

Second, genuine access to decision-making spaces. Consultation processes in Uzbekistan often invite DPOs to comment on documents that are already finalised, in rooms that may not be physically accessible, with materials that are not in accessible formats, without sign language interpretation. That is not co-authorship – it is the performance of inclusion. Real participation starts at the problem-definition stage, before solutions are on the table.

Third, and perhaps most fundamentally: a political culture that treats disabled people’s lived expertise as legitimate. Civil servants, international experts and academics need to internalise that people who live with disability know things about it that no policy paper can capture. That is not a soft or optional supplement to technical knowledge – it is essential knowledge. The CRPD principle of “nothing about us without us” should be operationalised as a procedural requirement for all disability-related legislation and programming in Uzbekistan.

Reasons for Hope

What gives you hope today in Uzbekistan, and what worries you most?

Hope: there is a new generation of disability rights activists in Uzbekistan who are young, connected, demanding, and tired of being patient. They use social media. They call out inaccessible buildings by name. The CRPD ratification also gives me hope, not because of what it has already changed, but because it shifts the terms of argument. Rights are no longer a Western imposition – they are a commitment the Uzbekistani state made to its own citizens.

I also worry about the pattern I observe across Central Asia: reforms are initiated from the top, which means they can be reversed or stalled from the top too. Genuine inclusion requires a society that demands it – a disability rights movement with political weight, public support, and allies across different sectors. We are building that, but slowly.

Dilmurad Yusupov can be followed at dilmurad.me and on social media as @d_yusupov.

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Interview by

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief at Novastan-English

Maya Ivanova, Contributor at Novastan

Thank you for reading this article! If you have time, we would appreciate your feedback, either through this anonymous form or by email at editorial@novastan.org. Thank you very much!

The post “Disability is a Mirror for the Development of Societies” – A Conversation with Dilmurad Yusupov appeared first on Novastan English.

Kyrgyz director Tolomush Zhanybekov turns his camera toward the people and places often left outside the frame: cemetery guards, pensioners selling their belongings, children facing humiliation, brothers bound by care and solitude. Born in Balykchy and based in Kyrgyzstan’s contemporary film scene, he builds a cinema rooted in roads, bazaars, industrial landscapes and social margins.

His films The Road, Birdsong, Balyk and Barakholka reveal a Kyrgyzstan far from the usual images of mountains and nomadic traditions. Through silence, fragile encounters and carefully chosen locations, Tolomush Zhanybekov explores loneliness, vulnerability and the quiet dignity of people living on the edges of public attention.

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In an interview with Novastan, the young filmmaker discusses his childhood, his relationship with cinema, the places that shape his work, the ethics of filming vulnerable people and the emergence of a new generation of Kyrgyz directors seeking to show an authentic, unvarnished Central Asia.

Novastan : Could you tell us about your journey into cinema? When did you first feel that you wanted to become a director?

Tolomush Zhanybekov : Since childhood, my main friend was the television. I hardly ever left the house: I watched all kinds of films and, figuratively speaking, spoke with the screen. Stories for my own films were constantly being born and developing in my head. Most likely, the desire to become a director came from that childhood solitude.

You were born in Balykchy, and several of your films seem very closely connected to specific places. Could you tell us where The Road, Birdsong, Balyk and Barakholka were shot, and why you chose those particular locations?

My graduation film, The Road, was shot in the city of Balykchy, where I was born and grew up. It is a very textured, visually rich place. Birdsong was shot in the village of Kaji-Say, in the Issyk-Kul region. In Soviet times, it was a thriving industrial town where coal was mined, and there was a uranium tailings site nearby. Today, there is a persistent feeling that time froze there somewhere in the 1990s. Balyk and Barakholka were shot in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

For readers discovering your work for the first time, could you briefly present each of these films in two or three sentences: what is it about, where does it take place and what drew you to this story?

The Road: The story of a 65-year-old cemetery guard. He lives and works far from the noise of the world, and in this silence, alone with those who have passed away, he paradoxically feels much more comfortable than among the living.

Birdsong: A documentary about two brothers. The elder brother finds it difficult to go outside, and the only person who looks after him is his younger brother, who goes to the village centre every day in search of casual work. Their meeting at the end of the day is the most important thing in their lives. Since childhood, I had been interested in what it means to have a brother, how such relationships work, how brothers support one another and what they talk about. One day, in a small village, I met these protagonists and understood that I had to make a film about them.

Barakholka: A documentary about pensioners. Every weekend, near my home, they set up a street market where they sell their old, vintage belongings. I have always been fascinated by watching them, their daily lives and the past they are selling off.

Balyk: A short fiction film about a teenager who stutters heavily, which makes it difficult for him to communicate with others. It is partly a personal story, as I faced this problem myself.

For readers who do not know Kyrgyzstan well, how would you describe places such as Balykchy, Bishkek, Barakholka or Kaji-Say, geographically, socially and personally?

Balykchy is the city of my childhood, in northern Kyrgyzstan, surrounded by picturesque but harsh landscapes. A place of winds and memories.

Bishkek is the city where I grew up. It is a noisy capital, where people from all regions come in search of a better life, creating a bubbling social melting pot.

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Kaji-Say is an abandoned industrial trace of a bygone era, squeezed between the mountains and Lake Issyk-Kul, where history itself seems to have come to a standstill.

Barakholka is not just a market, but a living open-air social archive, where people’s destinies are revealed through old objects.

How important is location to you in the process of making a film? Do you first find a place and build a story around it, or does a character appear first, after which you look for the right space?

In my work, location is a fully-fledged character. It conveys the atmosphere of the film in its own right. Sometimes I see a textured place, and a plot immediately begins to take shape within it. And sometimes I work the other way around: first the image of a character is born, and then I look for a space that could organically receive that character or emphasise their inner state.

Your films often focus on people who usually remain outside public attention: children, pensioners, solitary figures, people living or working in difficult social conditions. Why are you drawn to these kinds of protagonists?

In contemporary Kyrgyz cinema, these layers of the population are undeservedly neglected. They are rarely shown on screen. Mentally, all my characters are united by a deep inner loneliness, and it is precisely this vulnerability, this invisibility to the wider world, that attracts and moves me most.

In The Road, the road seems to be something more than just a physical space. What does it mean to you?

You are right. During my student years, I first came face to face with death: every autumn during my four years of study, someone in my family died. This tragic cycle forced me to think constantly about death and even, subconsciously, to wait for it. It may sound naive now, but at the time I desperately wanted to make sense of and understand a person’s departure. From these experiences came the metaphor of the road as a path between worlds, a transit from life into non-being.

Silence and atmosphere also play a very strong role in The Road. Is silence important in your cinema?

Yes, absolutely. To return to the previous question: to make sense of such fundamental things as life and death, silence was vitally necessary for me. In addition, as a director, I feel very close to a pure visual language. I like it when thoughts, feelings and dramaturgy can be conveyed to the viewer without unnecessary words, through pauses and the atmosphere of the frame.

Birdsong was your first documentary film. What pushed you towards documentary cinema?

By nature, I am a contemplative person. Since childhood, I could sit for hours and openly observe people, although now, of course, I do it more carefully and tactfully. Documentary is the foundation of cinema. It always contains genuine organic life, living human faces and real stories that cannot be artificially constructed within the framework of a fiction script.

How did you meet the protagonists of Birdsong, and how did you manage to build trust with them?

I was walking through the centre of the village and sat down at a bus stop, observing the local residents. From a distance, a man wearing a kalpak approached me. We began talking. From what he told me, I understood that he lived with his elder brother, was constantly looking for any kind of casual work and spoke about him all the time, with immense tenderness and anxiety. I suggested that he appear in a film, he agreed, and I immersed myself in their fragile, closed world.

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The trust between us probably emerged on the level of pure energy. My original intention was to make this film with great love and respect for them. I think the viewer feels that warmth through the screen and through the way the camera angles were chosen.

When you film real people, especially vulnerable people, how do you decide what can be shown and what should remain off camera?

It is always an extremely difficult inner dilemma. In documentary cinema, you very quickly become close to your protagonists. They become dear to you, and subconsciously there is a strong desire to protect them, to defend them, to show them from their best side.

During filming, I gather a lot of material. At the editing stage, when the final story is being built, I always mentally put myself in their place: how would I feel if this personal information became public? Here it is critically important to sense the fine line between artistic truth and ethics, to understand what needs to remain for the dramaturgy and what must be hidden from the viewer’s eyes forever.

In Balyk, the main character is a boy who lives between school, work at the market, loneliness and humiliation. Where did this story begin?

The word Balykchy means “fisherman” in Kyrgyz. In childhood, our family lived by cooking and selling fish. In addition, during my school years, I stuttered very badly. I remember that in the lower grades we had speed-reading tests: we had to read as many words as possible in one minute. In second grade, my classmates read between 40 and 65 words, while because of my stutter I managed only nine.

It was an enormous stress and trauma. At home, alone, I could read completely normally. I would memorise texts in advance, but as soon as I stood in front of the class, everything collapsed. The plot of Balyk grew out of these painful personal memories.

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What does the title Balyk mean to you? Is the fish a symbol in the film?

Yes, the fish is a key symbol here. When you cut or kill a fish, it does not make a single sound. Its “facial” expression does not change; you cannot read pain or emotion in it. My main character is locked in the same way in his muteness and loneliness in the face of a cruel outside world. He suffers silently, like a fish.

The market in Balyk is not only a workplace, but an entire social world. What did you want to show through this environment?

I wanted to capture our authentic bazaar. It is a unique space, always incredibly interesting to be in and to observe: all kinds of types, destinies, tragedies and comedies collide there. Moreover, the East is historically and culturally tied to bazaar culture. It is its heart and the mirror of society.

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Balyk is a Kyrgyz-French co-production. How did this international collaboration come about, and did it influence the development of the film or its reception?

In 2024, a Script Lab for authors from Central Asia was organised in Kazakhstan as part of the Post Space film camp. My mentor was Katya Khazak, a producer from France. At that time, I already had a rough cut of Balyk. I showed her the material, she liked the film very much and offered to help complete it at a high international post-production level.

Our project was supported by the European fund Creative Europe MEDIA. Thanks to this collaboration, we shortened and significantly improved the editing, and carried out professional sound correction and colour correction. This greatly raised the artistic level of the film.

Could you explain the title Kesilish joldogu pensionerlerdin maekterinen (Barakholka)? How would you translate it into English or French?

In English, the title translates as: Conversations of Pensioners at a Crossroads. The title contains a double meaning: the physical crossroads of the streets where they stand, and the crossroads of life at which they find themselves in the twilight of their days.

Why did you decide to film pensioners at Barakholka? What did you want to convey through their conversations?

I wanted to reveal their deep social loneliness, but at the same time to show their desperate, touching attempt to remain part of society, to be among people. Through their everyday conversations, sometimes sad, sometimes paradoxical, an astonishingly sincere and unembellished life emerges.

The outside view of Kyrgyzstan often focuses on mountains, nomadic traditions and impressive landscapes. Your films, by contrast, turn more towards everyday life, urban or semi-urban spaces, roads, markets and social margins. Is this a conscious choice?

Yes, it is an entirely conscious artistic choice. Our country is incredibly full of contrasts. Of course, we have majestic mountains and postcard landscapes, but there is another side of reality too: the everyday life of ordinary people, urban outskirts, the underside of society. This underside is still very little explored and rarely conveyed in cinema, and it is precisely this that I want to reveal to the viewer.

How would you describe the current generation of young Kyrgyz directors?

We are a generation of sincere and, in a good sense, naive directors. There is an enormous, pure desire burning in us to make films despite any difficulties and to rediscover for the world an authentic, non-ceremonial Central Asia.

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What are the main difficulties independent filmmakers face in Kyrgyzstan today: funding, distribution, education, censorship, access to audiences?

I would say that the main problems are specialised education and an acute lack of infrastructure for film production. Making films in co-production with other countries is especially difficult. We still lack the legal and technical foundations for easy international partnerships.

Do you feel part of a broader Central Asian cinema, or do you primarily see your work in the context of the Kyrgyz film scene?

I think I feel more like part of a broader regional, Central Asian cinema. Our countries have very similar historical backgrounds, common social problems and a mentality that is close in spirit, so we understand each other’s pains and joys very well.

What would you like international audiences to better understand about Kyrgyzstan through your films?

I do not have any specific educational or didactic goal. My task as a director is simpler and, at the same time, more difficult: to tell human stories honestly. If, through these local stories, foreign viewers can empathise with the characters, then the universal language of cinema has worked.

For Novastan readers who would like to discover your work: where can they watch your films? Are The Road, Birdsong, Balyk and Barakholka available online, shown only at festivals, or can they be watched on request?

Unfortunately, the films are not freely available online for now. They are currently in an active period of their life, so legally they can mainly be seen at film festivals.

Are there any upcoming screenings or festivals where viewers in Kyrgyzstan, France, Europe or online will be able to see your work?

No screenings are planned for the very coming months. The main wave of screenings and festival premieres is expected closer to autumn, when the new global film season traditionally begins.

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If readers discover your work through this interview, which film would you advise them to start with, and why?

I would recommend watching them in strict chronological order, starting with the 2022 work. That way, viewers will be able to see not only the stories of the characters, but also my personal evolution as an author, the development of my directorial language and my cinematic thinking as a whole.

What are you working on now, and would you like to make a feature film in the future?

Right now, I am working on my next short film. At the same time, I am taking a big step forward: I am writing the screenplay for my debut feature film.

Interview by

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief at Novastan-English

Maya Ivanova, Contributor at Novastan

Thank you for reading this article! If you have time, we would appreciate your feedback, either through this anonymous form or by email at editorial@novastan.org. Thank you very much!

The post Through roads, markets and silence: Tolomush Zhanybekov films Kyrgyzstan’s unseen lives appeared first on Novastan English.