Joqtau

Original title: Joqtau

Directed by: Aruan Anartay

Country: Kazakhistan

Length: 70 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Locarno Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: Darkhan and his girlfriend visit his grandfather.

RATING: 3.5/5

REVIEW

"young people don't understand the Kazak language anymore", states the Darkhan's grandfather in a scene. A simple line that encompasses in its entirety everything that Joqtau is about, and that conveys the same capable sense of hermetism that characterises the feature film in its image of Kazakhistan.

Traditions, rituals are central in this film, that gives voice to a culture that appears as fading. A conservative society, very religious and patriarchal with several issues, as the film points out, despite its nostalgic feels towards a cultural reality that the protagonist is partially participative with, but that he is also detached from: his relationship with his girlfriend Elena is modern. This disparity becomes crucial in some scenes, and leads to confrontations.

The grandfather is a character with a central importance: if Darkhan and Elena's roles are more contemplative, his is expositive. Through his remarks, monologues, songs, the film opens the curtains to the peculiar aspects of Kazaki culture, its traditions, its folklore. This is also where the film borrows its title from: Joqtau is a meditative traditional form of mourning specific to the Kazaki people.

In its insistence on still photographs, Joqtau suggests a sense of paralisis, of nostalgia towards moments fixed in time. It also seems to metaphorically capture the identity crisis that Kazakhistan experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the conformisation and the erasure of its culture under the communist regime. This is how Joqtau could be best interpreted, as a meditative, poetic form of mourning, that profoundly reminisces the slow fade of a millenary culture.