Barely disembarked from a fourteen-hour flight, followed by a somewhat chaotic descent on the RER B, the Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov, passing through Paris for the joint release ofAssault and of Ademoka’s Education, accuses the blow, but stands firm in the face of questions from journalists. Discreet in appearance, his youthful face covered with a veil of pensive melancholy, the 40-year-old artist does not let himself be fooled and gives brief but sure answers.
Discovered in France in 2018 with The tender indifference of the world, the man is the author of fourteen feature films in twelve years, a work represented in the main international festivals, but little known in France. Only two of them had hitherto appeared on local screens, completed by this beautiful double, which makes this filmmaker a little more familiar to us.
Born on August 7, 1982, in Jezkazgan, a mining town in central Kazakhstan, Adilkhan Yerzhanov has had an interest in cinema since childhood and studied at the National Academy of Arts of Kazakhstan, from which he graduated in directing in 2009. “For five years, I was led to make a lot of filmshe says. At the time, with frankly not terrible cameras and budgets close to zero, I did a lot… crap! But that’s what allowed me to gain experience and take the plunge into professional cinema. »
Gorgeous idiots
With its counter-current polars (A Dark, Dark Manin 2020, Assault Or Goliathin 2022), his philosophical fables (The tender indifference of the world, Ademoka’s Education), Yerzhanov maintains a rather devious relationship with genre cinema. “I was inspired a lot by the French neo-noir genre, for example the films of Jean-Pierre Melvillesays the director. In making a film, it is important for me to establish a territory, that is to say a space with clichés. Why start from clichés? Because we can go very far in negativity: we can shape obscure characters, complex and tortured antiheroes. I express a pessimistic vision without yielding to outrage or exaggeration. Darkness belongs to drama, and in it resides the expression of beauty. »
A singular touch of Yerzhanov’s cinema, darkness is constantly offset by buffoonish humor and masterfully incompetent characters, magnificent idiots. “Humour is very important to me.says the filmmaker. It is he who can still save a world on the verge of chaos. Any daily situation can be translated into terms of absurdity, and I want to highlight this ironic part of life. The idiots who populate my films contain a certain moral nobilityhe continues. Like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, this kind of character helps me make my cinema simpler, more accessible. »
You have 32.27% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.