A female shaman and her extortionist spouse enliven Elizaveta Stishova's human dramatization set in Kyrgyzstan, which won honors at the Eurasia Intl. Film Festival.
The amazing thing about Suleiman Mountain (Sulayman as well), a fascinating and engaging dramatization set in the Kyrgyz mountains, is its sentiment of realness, despite the fact that its chief is Russian. Elizaveta Stishova makes a noteworthy coordinating introduction with this surprising story, which includes a man on the edges of society driving around the nation in a camper with two spouses and a missing child. The way that the more established spouse is a working shaman includes a proudly enchanted note.
As the title appropriately recommends, area has a noteworthy part to play. Kyrgyzstan is a sloping nation held up amongst Kazakhstan and China, got between the old Soviet arrangement of the past and a devastated exhibit that has not yet gotten up to speed to a market economy. Fundamental this is an unforgotten old culture that the movie producers approach deferentially. Recorded around the hallowed Suleiman Mountain (now a World Heritage Site), the story conveys magical religious vibes that unobtrusively work to a moving peak. Joyfully, Alisa Khmelnitskaya's screenplay conveys this stuff daintily, making it the foundation to the coarse authenticity of a quarreling family who live out and about.
There are no awesome, taking off feelings here, which may check group of onlookers intrigue a bit, yet it's a touchy film brimming with turns that leads the watcher profound into the lives of its wanderer like outcasts. Subsequent to trekking around the celebration circuit, the Russian-Kyrgyz-Polish coprod got a warm gathering near and dear at the Eurasian Film Festival in Astana, where it won both the NETPAC and Fipresci grants.
Wearing conventional garments and a head scarf, Perizat Ermanbaeva plays the healer Zhipara. She's serious lady of few words, however not without a comical inclination. As the film opens, she is in a swarmed home for deserted youngsters, holding up to be brought together to her child. It's never clarified how he got isolated from his folks when he was a one-year-old; now the kid is a streetwise eleven or twelve and has no memory of his family. Be that as it may, little Uluk (the brilliant looked at Daniel Daiyrbekov) seizes the opportunity to leave the shielded claustrophobia of institutional life behind him.
The villagers salute Zhipara on discovering him, yet she sits tight anxiously for the response of her savage spouse Karabas, whose unpredictable grumpiness is passed on by Kazakh on-screen character Asset Imangaliev, taking a gander on the double perilously tousled and obscurely appealing. When he at long last turns up with his young second spouse, the sticking and trampish Turganbyubyu (Kyrgyz on-screen character Turgunai Erkinbekova), he seems satisfied to see the kid; she less so. The competition amongst Turganbyubyu and Zhipara is atavistic and significant, and it's difficult to see them asking for goodies of their mutual man's consideration. The young lady demands the kid isn't Karabas' child. She's pregnant, incidentally, making it basic for Zhipara to benefit as much as possible from this lost-and-discovered kid.
Stishova has a charmingly brief style of filmmaking and the activity moves along shrewdly. The two unfriendly spouses are compelled to contribute to maintain the privately-run company, which takes advantage of Zhipara's notoriety for being a renowned healer. Karabas drives his odd family around the nation in an old East German camper, evading indebted individuals while the ladies influence arrangements on their mobiles with individuals who to need to counsel Zhipara. She goes without hesitation in a paramount scene over Suleiman Mountain, feigning exacerbation in an evident stupor, snorting and whipping the supplicant.
Everybody appears to require her help with sicknesses and mental injuries, even a neighborhood leader. For each situation, Karabas discards her well deserved money on betting and drink. His unstable identity generally rules out caring sentiments towards Uluk, a brilliantly wry child who appears to be great mannered for this unpleasant family. The kid's concise snapshots of satisfaction and having a place dependably end in frustration and alarm, yet as Zhipara says hopefully, home is the place you're adored, and he sticks around through the family's misfortunes.
All through the film, questions are unpretentiously raised about realness. Is Uluk extremely the couple's lost child? Is Zhipara extremely a healer, or a scalawag like her significant other? In a key scene, she joins four white-robed ladies shamans who ask and sing to the consecrated spirits of Suleiman Mountain. They fall into a daze, snorting and washing little whips simply like Zhipara. One of these ladies, played grandly by Nasira Mambetova, might be her guide and coach. In any case, when she unfavorably declines to foresee Zhipara's future, you know it's terrible news.
Tudor Vladimir Panduru's cinematography moves easily between the obvious verse of immaculate nature and the coarse shabbiness in which the family lives. Karolina Maciejewska gives the altering a compact freshness that has nothing to do with moderation.
