The same morning, the same smell of manure, the same wall of water at nightfall.
Rauan fails his exams and is banished to his grandmother’s village, a backwater mudhole where the smell of manure gets into his clothes and nothing he thinks he needs exists. He is mocked, bored, hopelessly out of place, and then the dam gives way and the morning begins again.
Groundhog-Day meets disaster movie in a corner of Kazakhstan rarely seen on screen. Duman Erkimbek’s debut Quitadan is the very first Kazakh disaster film, a huge hit at home and Grand Prix winner at the Bishkek International Film Festival. The catastrophe Rauan is faced with is based on a true story: in 2010, a dam gave way at Kyzylagash, swallowing an entire village. For Rauan, his exile starts as a punishment and ends as a homecoming, in a landscape of hard work and Soviet jokes where the country’s heart beats. By the time the dam breaks, every villager will have grown on you, as they’ve grown on him.
