Darejan Omirbaev 

France/Kazahkstan
 

Critic, theorist and director Darezhan Omirbaev is a charter member of the 'Kazakh New Wave' that burst upon the scene at the Moscow festival in 1987 and stormed the Sundance festival the following year. His contribution was Summer Heat (1988), a short film likened to the creative origins of the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s. 

After graduating from the Moscow Film School (VGIK), Omirbaev worked as a critic before directing his debut feature film: Kairat (1991), the story of a young man from a village who falls victim to loneliness and despair in the capital city. Kairat, a kind of Truffaut/Leaud alter ego, is played by the same Talgat Assetov who appears in the title role of Tueur a gages (Killer).

Omirbaev's second feature, Kardiogram (1995), invited to compete at Venice and Nantes (where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize) sketches the fate of a young village boy sent to a sanatorium in Almaty. Although the shy outsider ends up running away because no one understands his own language or culture, Omirbaev's warming portrait emphasises the dawning of a whole new universe in his consciousness.

Killer (aka Contract Killer), a psycho-thriller with American film noir traits, is framed in the moralist aesthetics and narrative style of Robert Bresson: it's an innocent who experiences violence in today's Almaty and pays the penalty for social disorders he cannot even grasp. 

When Marat (Talgat Assetov), the driver for an institute director, borrows his employer's car to bring his wife and new-born child home from the hospital, he unfortunately has an accident. His quest to borrow money to pay for the repairs releases a chain of nightmares: his sister has been bankrupted by a bank scam, his employer commits suicide, the baby falls ill and needs expensive medical treatment and Marat is robbed by a gang of thugs. Finally, the only way out is to accept an offer from an old army friend, now a barman in a nightclub, to kill a troublesome journalist. Ron Holloway