When Kazakhstan is mentioned, there is usually only one clown that appears in people’s minds: Borat. RIVER DREAMS is his funeral.
Bold, yeah? Let me allow myself, with my debut film, a bit of my kind of sparkling humor. In my native language we have a saying, ‘there is a grain of truth in every joke’. I would go further and say, ‘there is a grain of joke in every joke’. Everything else is truth, isn’t it? By killing the Borat stereotype, I am trying to open a new space of meaning for a country that is also often dismissively called ‘Putin’s backyard’. Fuck it.
My country will be ruled by steppe queens one day. My film is a love-hate letter to Kazakhstan, told through a female gaze, already an act of resistance where I come from. I wanted to flood the screen with beautiful Kazakh girls: our strength, rage, pain, and tenderness, tenderness, tenderness. Radical tenderness.
When I speak of radicality, I mean radical vulnerability, the courage to be painfully honest and to believe that sincerity can disarm.
Kristina Mikhailova
