NYFF'08: Sergei Dvortsevoy
Steppe by Steppe
Sergei Dvortsevoy's new film TULPAN is one of two Kazakh films playing at this year's festival. Set on the barren, wind-blasted Hunger Steppe of southern Kazakhstan, Dvortsevoy's naturalistic comedy-drama concerns the efforts of Asa, a nomadic sheep herder, to court the painfully shy teen daughter of a neighboring family.
Dvortsevoy talks with us about the difficulty of making a film on the desolate steppe, making his move to filmmaking from working for the Russian airline Aeroflot, and his passion for filming the "truth."
Chekc out the rest of our 2008 New York Film Festival coverage.
Click here for a review of Tulpan.
Born in Kazakhstan, Sergei Dvortsevoy worked as an aviation engineer before studying film in Moscow in the early 1990s. His films immediately garnered international acclaim, receiving prizes and recognition at festivals around the world, including the nomination of Bread Day (1998) for the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival. The following year his work was presented at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an institution dedicated to Flaherty’s adherence to the goal of seeing and depicting the human condition. Intimate and elegant, Dvortsevoy’s documentaries are committed to observational filmmaking. His subjects—people living in and around a Russia in transition—try in their individual ways to eke out an existence. With a keen eye for the poetry and mystery of everyday life, and without narration or other forms of external exposition, Dvortsevoy proposes: “observe together with me quietly and everything will happen”.
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