Kerege köz: domestic enclosure and structural violence in Aizhan Kassymbek’s Madina

This article examines the depiction of structural violence in Aizhan Kassymbek’s Madina (2023). In the film, spaces and relationships that are usually associated with safety and comfort prove to be the opposite. Instead of providing shelter, domestic spaces and human-made structures emerge as sites of discipline and coercion. Rather than offering comfort, familial and romantic relationships prove to be fraught with violence. One of Madina’s central visual motifs – a hand position in a Kazakh traditional dance known as kerege köz, named after a diamond-shaped opening in the lattice of a yurt – gives structural violence a form in which the promise of an opening becomes a mechanism of enclosure. While the film offers occasional respite from the violence and disciplinary mechanisms lurking in societal structures, it ultimately forecloses the possibility of lasting change.