Tulpan

This page is about the Kazakh film. For the Russian mortar system, see 2S4 Tyulpan.

Tulpan
Directed by	Sergey Dvortsevoy
Produced by	Karl Baumgartner, Thanassis Karathanos
Written by	Sergey Dvortsevoy Gennady Ostrovskiy
Starring	Askhat Kuchinchirekov Samal Yeslyamova Ondasyn Besikbasov Tulepbergen Baisakalov Bereke Turganbayev Nurzhigit Zhapabayev Mahabbat Turganbayeva
Cinematography	Jola Dylewska PSC
Editing by	Isabel Meier Petar Markovic
Distributed by	Zeitgeist Films
Release date(s)	United States: October 9, 2008 (limited) April 1, 2009 (wide)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	Kazakhstan
Language	Kazakh and Russian (with English and French subtitles)

Tulpan is a 2008 Kazakh drama film. The film is directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy and distributed by Zeitgeist Films. Tulpan is Kazakhstan's 2009 Academy Awards official submission to Foreign Language Film category. It won the award for Best Film at the 2nd Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Overview

In a barren wasteland of a village, somewhere in the middle of Kazakhstan comes Asa, the film's protagonist. A recently discharged sailor for the Russian Navy, Asa comes to the Hunger Steppe where his sister Samal lives, along with her older husband, Ondas, and their three children, Beke, Maha, and little Nuka, who seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. Asa daydreams of becoming a herdsman with his own ranch. A boss who owns the land on the village decides that only established herdsman, with wives and grounded dreams may be given land to herd on. To do this Asa needs to marry his enigmatic "neighbor": Tulpan, the only woman eligible for marriage perhaps within a hundred miles. The plot of the story basically follows the trials of how Asa, his surrogate family, and his western culture-loving friend Boni help and mold the realization, disenchantment, and rebirth of Asa's dreams.

Awards and nominations

• Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival
• Winner, Best Feature Film, at the 2008 Montreal Festival of New Cinema (Festival du nouveau cinema)
• Kazakhstan's 2009 Academy Awards official submission for the Foreign-Language Film category
• Winner, Best Feature Film - Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2008
• Nominated, Achievement in Directing - Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2008

Development

Director Sergey Dvortsevoy was born in Kazakhstan, lived there for 28 years working for an aviation company, and was very familiar with Kazakhstan's countryside. In an interview at the New York Film Festival he revealed how he had always wanted to tell a story about such a barren setting. Dvortsevoy has said that the people who live in the Hunger Steppe have always intrigued him; in the interview he revealed how he has always noticed an inner balance to the people that live in this part of the world, a happiness despite subjective adversity that has always interested him. Casting for the film took many, many months, and Dvortsevoy recalls having sent crews with small cameras to nearly every city in Kazakhstan in search of the right cast members. Having found them, he made the main cast (Asa, Samal, Ondas, Beke, Maha and Nuka) live in the yurt depicted in the film for one month before filming. In the interview, Dvortsevoy described how the story came together, 20 percent of the film was from his original script while the other 80 percent came about from a real-time reworked script based on the circumstances and conditions that arose on location. Dvortsevoy rehearsed all of the sequences with the animals or on the tractor, but the emotional scenes were rehearsed without dialogue and only fully performed at the time of filming. Samal, who played Asa's sister and the mother of the children, was the only professional actress on set having worked on stage in the theater, however at the time of filming she was only nineteen years old. Still "only a child herself", she struggled to grow accustomed to the household chores and motherly duties during her month living in the yurt. Askhat Kuchinchirekov, the actor who portrayed Asa, was not a professional but still a student at one of the film schools in Kazakhstan. The three children were able to rehearse scenes to different degrees with the exception of Nurzhigit Zhapabayev, the little boy who played Nuka, who Dvortsevoy simply "let loose" to be as wild and natural as one of the "animals".

Reception

The film was well received. It received a 95% rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and praised it in his review. Upon the film's initial release in Kazakhstan, at a special screening of 1500 people, although it was praised by the herdsman and rural folk depicted in the film, it was criticized and looked down upon by some Kazakhstan government officials, who felt that the film portrayed an even more degrading picture of Kazakhstan than Borat. Internationally the film was a great success doing well at some of the world's most prestigious film festivals. The film has been praised for its poetic realism, the relationships and depth sustained by its characters, the film's simplicity, patience, and care for its subject matter, and also for its depiction of a world that is seemingly lost in time and space, increasingly fading away more and more into the past.

External links

• Tulpan official site
• Tulpan at the Internet Movie Database
• Tulpan at Rotten Tomatoes
• Tulpan at Metacritic
• New York Film Festival Interview