TULPAN

The trouble is that most people simply don’t like reality. They find it sordid, uninteresting, and so they run away from it. They’re afraid of it. On the contrary, I like reality, I love it. I’m just fond of life. – Sergei Dvortsevoy

Until the 2006 release of BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN, probably few Americans had heard of the independent Central Asian nation. But Sacha Baron Cohen’s use of very European Romania as a stand-in location didn’t help further our knowledge of Kazakhstan anyway. TULPAN, while not made to address Cohen’s satirical disrespect of the mores and customs of “the Kazakhs,” nonetheless presents a far more realistic and loving image of the people of the steppe.

After a decade of documentary filmmaking, Kazakhstani director Sergei Dvortsevoy purposely chose the steppes of his homeland as the setting for his initial foray into narrative cinema. He explains: “The steppe is very important for Kazakh people. It’s like the motherland of Kazakhstan because Kazakh people used to be nomads. They love the steppe. They love it very much, but at the same time they are shy of presenting this place to the whole world. They think the steppe is a poor place. Very often I’ve been asked why I wanted to present this place to the world audience. They say, ‘It’s not good. Please show them our cities, our industry. Show them our big cars, our big houses.’ Today, most of the young … want to live in cities. They think it’s more comfortable, easier to make a living. But in fact it is not. Sometimes it’s easier to live on the steppe. The steppe is a legendary place, but Kazakhs are shy of the legend.”

The 21st century is bringing dramatic changes to Kazakhstan, and Dvortsevoy’s narrative looks at two young Kazakhs with different dreams – Asa, newly returned from the Russian navy and ready to settle down on the steppe with some sheep, a wife, a yurt, children, and a TV, and his best friend Boni, who wants to live in a large city where beautiful women and well-paying jobs are “plentiful.” Both dreams can be pursued in the 9th largest country in the world – “nearly four times the size of Texas,” according to the CIA, who ought to know. Bordering Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and China, this “largest landlocked country” with a population of 15 million (15 people per square mile) is actually quite blessed with natural resources – gas and oil being the principal ones which have attracted Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Israeli financial interest. The CIA also notes that “Kazakhstan's economy is larger than those of all the other Central Asian states combined, largely due to the country's vast natural resources and a recent history of political stability” [under strong man president Nursultan Nazarbayev, faithfully mentioned in TULPAN].

Descended from “Turkic and Mongol” nomadic tribes, the “Kazakhs” became a “distinct group” by the 16th century. Russians began advancing into their territory in the 18th century and made all of the Kazakh territory an integral part of the Russian empire in the mid-19th century. As the Russian Revolution of 1917 spread throughout the tsarist empire, Kazakhstan took twenty years to become an official part of the USSR.

According to the CIA World Handbook, in the post-Stalinist era Moscow encouraged immigration into Kazakhstan by Russians to settle “Virgin Lands,” particularly in the northern pastures of the country. Within a few decades the size of the Russian immigrant population nearly equaled that of the native Kazakhs, and Russian became the language of schools and government, while Kazakh was increasingly relegated to the countryside. Besides Russians being exported to Kazakhstan from the Soviet Union, there was also nuclear testing. Some of the vast barren areas became the Soviet Union’s principal nuclear test sites [like America’s Nevada and Pacific Islands].

On 16 December 1991, Kazakhstan was the last Soviet “republic” to declare Independence after the collapse of Communism. Even so, relations with Russia have apparently remained stable. Nursultan Nazarbayev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (1989-1991), effortlessly glided into becoming President of Kazakhstan, just as easily as he went from being an avowed atheist to going on a hajj to Mecca. Perhaps it is no wonder that he continues to win elections to stay in power. 

Filmmaker Sergei Dvortsevoy, born in Kazakhstan in 1962, is the son of ethnic Russian immigrants. With both parents being engineers, it was no surprise that Sergei would study engineering, also – aviation engineering in Ukraine and then at the Radio Engineering Institute in Novosibirsk in Siberia. He worked at an airport in Kazakhstan for nine years during the 1980s – “We flew test flights, doing equipment tests. I grew bored with it. It was a routine job. I learned the aircraft inside out so that it no longer interested me. And one evening, I opened the local paper and it said [that] anyone interested in applying to the Higher Courses at VGIK [All-Russian State University of Cinematography] should send in an essay. So I wrote something, having nothing better to do. I didn’t do any research, just sent it to Kazakhfilm. And they wired me to attend the entrance exams on such and such a day. I passed the exams and was accepted to Moscow.... In fact, I had no particular desire to be a film director. If the paper had said, sign up for dancing classes, I would have signed up just the same. Just out of boredom. I never dreamt of making films. I had never so much as held a camera in my hands. I couldn’t even really take photographs. The technology wasn’t so widespread before, but I knew absolutely nothing. I didn’t have any particular interest in the arts, either; that is, I read a lot – as you may know Russians are traditionally avid readers, but I didn’t know much about the cinema. Of documentary films I knew nothing at all, the fact that I ended up in the documentary department was another accident – if it had said animation, I would have gone to animation. But it said documentary, so I became a documentary filmmaker.” Dvortsevoy thus joins Akira Kurosawa in the ranks of the accidental directors who become excellent filmmakers.

But Dvortsevoy’s major shift in education came at a very turbulent time. He had just begun attending classes in Moscow, when the Soviet Union collapsed almost overnight in 1991, leaving the 29-year-old with no scholarship. Somehow the school stayed open and Dvortsevoy says that he found “other means” of getting by.    

He couldn’t have asked for a better film school: “It was a very tiny and open-minded place. There were no grades, and the teaching took the form of discussions. And we discussed just about everything – film, music, philosophy, religion, painting – in the form of seminars and had workshops with various interesting people. And we watched a lot of films, we saw three or four a day. It was a really intensive education. It started in the morning and often went on until ten at night… There were three groups [in] the documentary department, about fifteen of us all together.” The film selections were wide-ranging – “the history of both world and Russian cinema, including the earliest films, animated films, features, documentaries – if you were a documentary student they wouldn’t show you only documentaries, they showed us all kinds of films. It was a very broad film education, and all the departments had classes together. There were only several specialized courses for each field. But students of documentary also had workshops in working with actors, for instance.” The latter would certainly help him in his later work.

By the time he graduated in 1993, state supported cinema in Russia was completely wiped out. Distribution to theaters also collapsed. But out of the chaos came new opportunities. Dvortsevoy returned home to Kazakhstan to make his first documentary, PARADISE (1996). His subject was a Kazakh family living out on the steppe, a good preparation for his first feature, TULPAN, but that would have to wait a decade. Instead, to secure funding for this first documentary, the novice director was told to go see a Georgian businessman, who might provide production money. All Dvortsevoy knew about the man was that he “dealt in aluminum.” Cowboy capitalism was sweeping over Russia and its former satellites, so money was available but always from mysterious sources. Dvortsevoy showed the businessman some video footage and was asked how much he needed for his documentary about the Kazakh family.  The budding director asked for the equivalent of $5000 to buy 35mm film stock and was breezily handed the money from a safe. Dvortsevoy asked no questions until later, after PARADISE had won a lot of prizes at international film festival: “I spoke to the people from that company again. They told me that they never expected me to make a film at all. They thought I would just take the money and vanish. They gave it to me basically to leave them alone.”

Following the critical and monetary success of his first documentary, Dvortsevoy returned to Russia where he found the subject of his second film – BREAD DAY (1998), which follows old-age pensioners living outside St Petersburg and who had to push a railway car loaded with their weekly bread allocation  – for about two miles. Here, he had a riveting subject touching on old age and a difficult retirement in a turbulent country undergoing enormous economic, social, and political changes. “So I took the film stock, rented a camera, asked a cameraman friend of mine – and off we went, without money or crew, to that village. I paid the camera rental myself, I paid my friend something, I recorded the sound myself.” The unexpected filmmaker had obviously found his passion.

The next year he returned to his native Kazakhstan to do a documentary entitled HIGHWAY (1999). He had originally intended to make a film about long-haul truckers but became fascinated by a family with a traveling circus and completely changed the focus of his project.

His fourth documentary, IN THE DARK (2004), seemed to deplete his energy and certainty about the entire documentary process. He had met a blind man who made string bags in a suburb of Moscow and tried to give them away to passersby, but almost to a person, no one accepted his offer, preferring to use plastic bags or not get involved with a blind man on the street. It was that image of the kind blind man being turned down that captured Dvortsevoy’s attention and camera. “Life has passed by, and he’s standing there with his string bags. He is alive, but at the same time he is in fact dying, because nobody needs him. He is old, nobody wants his string bags, but the people who don’t take them from him are not to blame – it’s just that life is elsewhere now.”

Despite all the international praise for his four documentaries, Sergei Dvortsevoy felt “morally exhausted” after digging so deeply into the lives of others. So, he  dug up an old script he had written at film school in Moscow and sought financing. This script would be set in his native country of Kazakhstan and would show something of his love and admiration for the people of the steppe. Examining his original hundred-page script, he intuitively knew that he wouldn’t stick to it too closely: “As a director, I don’t like a film when I can explain and predict everything that I’m seeing. I understand that some directors are like mathematicians who just calculate everything. For me, this is not interesting.”

He knew that the majority of the characters would be played by Kazakhs living in the area he selected for his setting – 500 miles from a city – but for the principal protagonist Asa, he chose Ashkat Kuchinchirekov, a student at the Kazakh film academy with dreams of becoming a director. Asa’s sister, Samal, was played by Samal Yesylamova, a professional theater actress.  And the most surprising choice was Ondasyn Mesikbasvo, who played the shepherd Ondas, married to the character Samal, and who is a professional opera singer from Kazakhstan. Besides the tractor driver Boni, all other parts were played by non-professionals.

So, with locations chosen and actors/non-professionals gathered up, Dvortsevoy set out with a relatively small crew, but much larger than the 3-4 people he used on documentaries. He knew that the story would entail a young man’s search for a bride where they were few options. Asa has just returned from service in the Russian Navy in the Pacific. With no coastline in his country, Asa’s dream of seafaring had to be satisfied by service in a foreign country. This certainly revealed his desire to know more about the world. But Tulpan, the young woman whom he tries to court, is apparently uninterested in his stories of seahorses and octopus battles. His sister’s husband as go-between promises Tulpan’s parents ten sheep and a rather small crystal chandelier, which might actually look a bit out of place in an animal-hide covered yurt, no matter how comfortable it might actually be. Tulpan’s mother has other ideas for her daughter – education in the city rather than marriage to a virtually penniless herder with no herd. There’s something else that Tulpan ostensibly doesn’t like about Asa, despite the deftly displayed photograph of Prince Charles of Britain. With this set-up, Dvortsevoy’s film might have remained nothing more than a rather sweet romantic comedy of the steppes had he not captured a very poignant moment on film. Much like the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who patiently waited for the right moment to capture real life, Dvortsevoy had learned through documentary filmmaking that preparation, time, and luck often brought wonderful surprises.

To get a version of a particular scene that he hoped would be powerful, the director had his camera crew follow the malnourished sheep for weeks. They had to know how to “move with the animals” and prepare themselves for all eventualities. Their shepherd was connected to the crew via radio communications and could let them know at a moment’s notice when a good opportunity for the desired scene had arisen. Although he had rehearsed the crew, Dvortsevoy decided not to rehearse the expected scene with Asa, because he wanted his actor’s responses and actions to be completely fresh and real, as they would be for a returning sailor back out on the steppe. Finally, the moment for filming the scene arrived [I am purposely not saying what it is, so you can be as surprised as Asa]. Dvortsevoy describes the event: “As soon as we shot it, I realized it was something very unique, something different compared with the initial script. I was shocked in a way because it was so powerful and so long at the same time that I didn’t know what to do with it, how to edit it; it was just one piece with no cut. I decided that if I cut it, I’d lose its power, its beauty. And then I was forced to review the script and the story for the sake of the beauty of this scene. I redid a lot. In the end I think I used about twenty percent of the initial script, so I changed about eighty percent” after getting the desired shot. “We improvised it a lot and we changed many scenes and we added some scenes, completely new scenes, because I saw some situations in shooting time and decided to change the script.”

By that point his cast and crew were getting quite accustomed to life on the steppe.  Even before filming had begun, Dvortsevoy had sent the crew to live in yurts in the shooting location.  After two weeks, the crew built a brick “hotel” in which they would reside the rest of the shoot. However, the actors didn’t get to move to the hotel but had to live in yurts during the entire time. The fictional couple, Samal and Ondas, began living together with their “children” about a month before shooting began. Dvortsevoy explains his method: “I wanted them to be very close to each other. This was very important for the children as well. To get used to each other and capture the family atmosphere on the screen.” It absolutely worked because the children seem so natural around their cinematic parents.

Explaining his production rationale, the filmmaker says, “If I’d changed the method of making TULPAN and used some, let’s say, ‘standard,’ approaches to making a fiction film, I am sure I would not have achieved what we ended up with. It would have been some mediocre film with animals, with children, without any mystery, without any surprises. However, I didn’t try to think up a special approach, I just followed the material, followed the characters. It doesn’t come from calculation, from mathematics. It comes from my soul.”

By purposely using long takes with minimal editing, Dvortsevoy, like some of the great European directors, allows us “to choose how we see the story.” He adds, “You just allow things to develop. The spectator is free to see what they want. You’re not just using cuts to stress something. I don’t like to control the movie completely, you know?”

There is another way that he draws us into the world of TULPAN: “I propose for the audience to live with [the characters], not to follow every second of the story but also sometimes to breathe with them and feel like you live with them in real time. That’s why I have these long takes. It gives the possibility for people to be inside the picture. Not only to be a spectator watching something entertaining but also to live this life, to feel the dust, to feel the wind and all the physical reality.” Thus, his documentary training and experiences have actually formed his approach to narrative filmmaking.

Apparently some jaded viewers have assumed that computer-generated-imagery was used in several shots. Dvortsevoy adamantly clarifies: “What you see, all these things are real. All the scenes with animals, we didn’t use any special trainers. We just observed life and of course sometimes we were lucky enough that things happened - for instance, tornadoes [more like big West Texas dust devils to my eyes]. Those shots, we caught them. This is real observation, you know, waiting for something and also creating some life situations with animals. A strong mix of real life and nature into fictional situations.”

But this is not to imply that he didn’t edit the film. Even though he was shooting on 35mm film stock, rather than the increasingly more common digital formats, his average ratio of footage shot/footage used in the film was 20/1, an expensive proposition. The director explains, “When you shoot animals and children, which are the most unpredictable, you’re going to use much more material, also much more time.” He adds an aesthetic explanation: “Using film is also a psychological issue. For the director, and the actors, it creates a different kind of concentration. You understand you have just one attempt to make this. Each shot is like a little painting. You understand that when you make a mistake, you’ve made a mistake. Of course you can correct it, do another take, but you can’t just rewind and use the same tape. You understand that you must be concentrating. It gives a certain kind of power, a certain kind of energy to actors and to all the crew. If I approach it as painting a fresco, I concentrate far more, how to shoot, from what angle, I prepare far more intensely.” Those are the words of a true film artist.

By no means is Dvortsevoy the only filmmaker in Kazakhstan, but he is perhaps the most innovative and creative. He describes the native industry: “On the one hand, the Kazakh Film Studio is a huge enterprise and all the money from the state for production goes there. There are some independent studios, but only the state studio gets the government money. Kazakh Film Studio makes around eight to ten films a year, but the quality of these films is generally quite poor. This is a problem with many former Soviet Union countries because they feel like they have to be different, and they don’t consider themselves a part of world filmmaking. That’s why they make many stupid mistakes. There are very smart, interesting people working in Kazakhstan, but the studios just cannot write interesting scripts. It’s a big problem. It’s also a problem of film education. Still there is some film tradition here, and Kazakh Film Studio shoots about five of their films on 35mm each year. It’s not bad. But the quality . . . the first problem is the scripts. They want to make just Hollywood films.” 

Although Dvortsevoy avoids any overt criticism of Kazakhstan or its government in TULPAN, his depiction of sickly or hungry sheep, incapable of bearing viable new lambs, may suggest problems created by the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb tests decades before. The CIA (never thought I’d be quoting them so much) describes environmental issues in Kazakhstan: “Radioactive or toxic chemical sites associated with former defense industries and test ranges scattered throughout the country pose health risks for humans and animals; industrial pollution is severe in some cities; because the two main rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea have been diverted for irrigation, it is drying up and leaving behind a harmful layer of chemical pesticides and natural salts; these substances are then picked up by the wind and blown into noxious dust storms.” Simply by showing the harsh elements of nature in his film may plant a few questions in the viewer’s mind. He has not said so in any interviews, and he certainly didn’t create the dead lambs or the dust storms through CGI; he simply depicted the surroundings and has left us to wonder about the causes of such things.

But most importantly, in TULPAN Dvortsevoy has told a universal story and has shown that we all can have common ground with Asa, who is young, kind-hearted, and desirous of a companion and a few simple things in an area that he calls beautiful – no matter how it might look to others from different locations. Dvortsevoy provides his own explanation of what he hoped to accomplish with the film: “For me this film is about a need to be happy, even in this tough place. I always try to find some poetry in everyday life, something metaphysical. When I observe some social phenomenon and contemplate it, I find a deeper thought, an image...”

He hopefully realized he had succeeded in finding the poetry of the steppe when TULPAN received the prestigious “Un Certain Regard” award at Cannes, as well as ten other international awards in 2008.

Sources
•    Jeff Reichert, “Stepping Out: An interview with Sergei Dvortsevoy,” Reverse Shot, Issue 24
•    DocScene [Scottish Documentary Institute] from DOX, Autumn 2008
•    Luck Buckmaster, Interview with Sergei Dvortsevoy, Cinetology, April 27, 2009
•    “The Documentary Has Morally Exhausted Me, Interview with Dvortsevoy, Institute of Documentary Film
•    Video Interview with Director Sergey Dvortsevoy: Part I, In English, New York Film Festival 2008, 8:19

•    Boni the tractor driver's favorite song: Boney M, “Rivers of Babylon,” Video, 2002
.    For this one you may be redirected. If so, just scroll down to World Factbook: CIA World Factbook: Kazakhstan

•    TULPAN, Zeitgeist Films
. Back to TULPAN screening