Young Ulbolsyn plans to move abroad with her younger sister Azhar from Kazakhstan. All that there remains to do is deal with one last formality: to officially take Azhar out of the village school she has been attending. The complications caused by the class teacher who is unwilling to help are nothing compared to what Ulbolsyn has yet to experience when she discovers that her sister has been kidnapped. The story of the struggle of ordinary people against the unscrupulous and powerful, spiced with a trace amount of absurd humour, culminates in an unexpectedly harsh finale.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Adilkhan Yerzhanov graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts with a degree in filmmaking, and then was able to study further in New York thanks to a scholarship. So far, he has made the biggest impression with his epic romance The Gentle Indifference of the World (2018) with which he competed at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. Ulbolsyn, his most recently completed film, was awarded as the Best Asian Film at the Tallinn IFF.