Kazakhstan: Birth of a Nation (2008)

In 1998, seven years after the independence of the country, autocratic president Kazakh Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to move the capital of Almaty to Astana, the barren plains of the north. Vertiginous towers of glass rise above ground, financed by oil exports. A presidential speech in 1997 on the future of Kazakhstan opens the film, praising the “three social levels, the rich, the middle class and the poor”, and the infinite promises of the market.
Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard see the birth of a new social level, in the standardized tinsel and foil of richness. Attempting to represent “the fiction which in each scene seems to have preceded reality”, until a change of scene by writer Darejan Omirbaev, they also venture backstage, a hut on a site of a recently expropriated maisonnette. A portrait of a melancholic person and poetic globalization through the ex-Soviet oligarchy, in full expansion.