Trajectories of female voices in modern Kazakh cinema: seeing and naming, experiencing physically and breaking with expected models of behaviour

This article addresses the transformation of film form in women’s auteur cinema in contemporary Kazakhstan. It focuses on methods of expression based on the organisation of time, space, rhythm, physicality and sensuality in the films of Sharipa Urazbayeva (Mental Loneliness), Aizhan Kassymbek (Madina), Asel Aushakimova (Bikechess) and Zhannat Alshanova (Becoming). The analysis underlines the directors’ focus not on an event, but on the inner time of the heroine’s gradual maturation and her personal choices. Duration, observation, work with space, arrhythmical narrative and tactile expressiveness of the image become means of revealing inner time and forming a female subjectivity in the traditional system of expectations. A new model for the directors’ trajectory emerges: seeing, naming, experiencing physically, choosing and breaking. Unlike male directors, the women’s cinema reveals a special sensitivity to the cinematic form, where meaning is born through gradual experience and movement of characters towards their own choice. In a world undergoing social, political and traditional upheavals, such directorial optics allow us to talk not so much about a catastrophe but about a person learning to live in a changed reality.