Archive sections: ‘Kyrgyzstan’
I was taken aback and intrigued by an email that arrived over the weekend. It really grabbed my attention. A film crew are preparing a documentary film on camels and I was asked if I had any advice for them.
In Britain, August is known as the “Silly Season” – the period during the summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media due to the “lack of hard news” as people are away on their holidays and governments and businesses close down for the holidays. It’s the same here. The [...]
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy months, although the name itself probably comes from an earlier time. As the Islamic calendar is a lunar one, then the date of Ramadan according to the Gregorian Calendar changes each year.
A news item during the week attracted my attention: “Kyrgyz yachtsmen Ignatiev and Soleny won Royal race of 20 miles in Thailand“ Kyrgyz yachtsmen wining a race in a sailing regatta? … but Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked country. As it says in the CIA World Factbook: “Coastline: 0 km (landlocked);” It goes on to record under [...]
Following last week’s postcard about developments in Kyrgyz Cinema … I was intrigued to come across a news item about a young Kyrgyz born filmmaker, Dair Karakeev. The story appeared in a youth orientated newspaper, “Limon“, (“Lemon”), because although the hour and a half long film is not due to receive its premiere until September, [...]
This weekend I got a bit of a surprise and although to say that I was “gobsmacked” might be a bit of an overstatement, I was certainly taken aback.
Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, (HHGTTG or H2G2 to aficionados), may be famous for his answer to “the great question of … Life, the Universe and Everything … “, (that is: “forty-two”), but his quirky sense of humour also resulted in a number of interesting “one liners”. One of [...]
Saratan is a film made in 2005 by the Kyrgyz director Ernest Abdyjaparov, with financial assistance from Germany, and distributed in the West by a German company. The film was made more than ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union - when the various socialist republics suddenly found themselves with unexpected independence – which brought with it an economic malaise following the withdrawal [...]
Beshkempir, (known in the West as “The Adopted Son”), a film by Aktan Abdikalikov and was made in 1988. It was his first feature film and has been hailed as “a worldwide success”.
Ernest Abdyjaparov was born in Bishkek in 1961. After finishing High School, in 1978, he made several applications to enter the All Union Cinematography Institute in Moscow – ironically, as it turned out, unsuccessfully. Instead, he launched himself into a varied career which included: a year with the Music School of the Osh Pedagogical Institute; [...]
