Breathing in water: female consciousness and film form in recent Kazakh cinema

Kazakh cinema has historically marginalised female perspectives, both through the dominance of male filmmakers and through representations that confine women to secondary roles. This article examines how a new generation of Kazakh women filmmakers challenges this tradition by making female interiority central to their films. Through comparative close analysis of five recent award-winning films – Aizhan Kassymbek’s Madina (2023), Sharipa Urazbayeva’s Mental Loneliness (2024), Malika Mukhamejan’s Longer Than a Day (2024), Zaka Abdrakhmanova’s Dad Croaked on Saturday (2024) and Zhannat Alshanova’s Becoming (2025) – the article considers how mirrors, breathing and water function to render perceptible the protagonists’ consciousness, emotions and embodied experience. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s concept of parler femme, or the ‘female imaginary’, it argues that these films develop a cinematic language centred on the intimate, the invisible and the fluid. Mirrors transform looking into self-perception; breath gives material form to otherwise invisible states of consciousness; and water creates spaces of freedom and possibility. Together, these strategies position women as subjects rather than objects of the cinematic gaze, developing novel ways of representing female subjectivity and reshaping the face of contemporary Kazakh cinema.