“Don’t Try to Please the West” – Screenwriter Kazybek Orazbek on Kazakh Cinema
Kazybek Orazbek is one of the screenwriters behind a recent shift in Kazakh cinema, as locally produced horror and thriller films have begun to punch above their weight, both at the domestic box-office and internationally. His credits include Dästür, the Kazakh-language horror film that earned more than 1 billion tenge ($2.2 million) in its first week, and Auru, a 2025 drama-thriller released with a 21+ rating in Kazakhstan and screened internationally under the English title Sicko. In an interview with The Times of Central Asia, Orazbek explains why deeply local stories can resonate globally, why Kazakhstan’s film industry needs international markets, and what mistake local filmmakers most often make when trying to appeal to Western audiences. TCA: Sicko, for which you wrote the screenplay, is a genre film aimed at mass audiences, yet it ended up in the International Film Festival Rotterdam program. Was that your goal from the beginning? Orazbek: Honestly, when we made the film, we weren’t thinking about festivals at all. We never set ourselves the task of getting into an international competition. We simply made a film we ourselves would want to watch. But after Dastur (Tradition), we met the European producer Anna Katchko and showed her Sicko. She immediately said the film had strong festival potential and started promoting it. That’s how it ended up in Rotterdam. If we had thought about festivals earlier, perhaps we could have submitted it to larger festivals as well. We finished the film after most major deadlines had already passed. TCA: How did international audiences react to the film? Orazbek: It was an interesting experience. We were given a fairly large screening hall with 600–700 seats. At first, the audience consisted mainly of Kazakhs living in Rotterdam and nearby cities, so everything felt familiar. I wasn’t nervous because our whole team was there – director Aitore Zholdaskali, actor Ayan Utepbergen, and producers Kuanysh Beisek and Almas Zhali. But then more and more foreigners started arriving, Europeans in the broadest sense, people of different ages, backgrounds and appearances. And when you realize they came specifically to watch a story created in Kazakhstan for a Kazakh audience, it becomes overwhelming. TCA: Were you nervous? Orazbek: It was a strange feeling. I was both happy and extremely anxious. I sat there listening to the audience reactions. They reacted even more intensely than audiences back home. They laughed exactly where they were supposed to laugh, and they were genuinely frightened where we wanted them to be frightened. Every emotion we had built into the film, they understood perfectly. That surprised me because they are far removed from Kazakh reality, yet they still connected with the story exactly as intended. Maybe that distance made their reactions somehow “cleaner” and more direct. Whenever someone left the theater, I worried they hated the movie. In my head I kept saying, “Please come back.” Thankfully, people returned and stayed until the end. TCA: And what was the reaction during the Q&A afterward? Orazbek: The film was very...
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