Pustoy dom

This well-paced production opens on Ascel, a girl on a country road in Kyrgyzstan, who sells apricots from a bucket with her brother. Self-determined, practical, and energetic, Ascel avoids the advances of one man, marries another, and runs off on her wedding night, vowing to make her way to the big city. "They're tough in Moscow, too," a relative warns Ascel; indeed, her first residence in the city is an underground shelter inside a factory, which she enters through a mythical hole in the wall. Ascel tries, with her small bag of tricks, to "make it," but soon finds that, for all her resourcefulness and adaptability, she's lacking in street smarts. Though she's no innocent, she's barely a mature individual and doesn't comprehend that dreams of success can come at a high price. Director Nurbek Egen, who was raised in Kyrgyzstan, weaves a surprising and touching micro-odyssey of a woman's first step into the intersection of village life and modernity. The film had its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival on 7th June 2012.

Scriptwriter Ekaterina Tirdatova and director Nurbek Egen cleverly weave this cross-cultural story across a series of national and international frontiers in such a way that nothing seems force. The amoral Ascel (played in a brilliant debut performance by Maral Koichukaraeva) decides to leave her tiny village and messy personal life by stealing money from her new husband and heading for the big city and a better life – she hopes. But nothing turns out as she expects. Thrown into the polyglot culture of Moscow's underclass, peopled by immigrants from the far-flung former Soviet republics and controlled with casual brutality by police and criminals alike, Ascel somehow keeps her head above water by replying on her beauty and taking the path of least resistance. But one senses that her luck cant last.........

Nurbek Egen and Ekaterina Tirdatova's film (Kyrgyzstan's nomination for the forthcoming foreign language Oscars) is very impressive: the viewer immediately gets the sense that these are film-makers who know their business. A rich, detailed and unsentimental picture emerges of life in post-Soviet society, and how tough it is out there in the demise of traditional social values. The skill of the film-makers is shown in the way that they trust the audience to pick up the story without necessarily having every last detail explained to us: we fill in the gaps ourselves and quite soon understand that a coherent network of social relationships – intelligently delineated and systematically developed – governs the overall drift of the story. The movie's sophistication can be discerned in the way that the excitement of the tale (and it's very exciting) isn't dependent on straightforward genre conventions of torture and revenge. Certainly, there is a prey and there is a pursuer. But who will outwit whom in this game of high stakes is kept back to the very last moment. The milieu that is sketched here is beginning to be familiar to Western viewers through powerful films like last year's Elena. It is a world where crime is an ordinary part of life, and where middle-class values of decency and respect for the individual hold little sway. "Each man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost!" Yet even in Darwinian cesspools there are distinctions to be made. The heroine Ascel, for all her single-minded ruthlessness, keeps a kind of innocence: this is what is moving about the film – it's not completely a story about corruption. The actress in question (Maral Koichukaraeva) is absolutely brilliant – as brilliant as she is beautiful. But in fact all the acting is good, the secondary parts as well as the principals. The Empty Home is properly ambitious in its imaginative grasp of an evolving society in all its complexity. But where it is most ambitious is in refusing to condescend to the audience. There are no "feel-good" let-out clauses. At the end you find yourself thinking: This is the real thing.

The film inhabits the realm of tragicomedy, for violence and suffering are coupled with absurdity and dark humour. Yet it is precisely this ambivalence between light and dark that makes the story so engaging. The suspense is there to keep us wary of what might happen next and the characters are both laughable and endearing enough to make us engaged in their life. The cinematography is also incredibly beautiful; the vividness and contrast of colours make even the bleak, empty countryside, or the squalor of poverty beautiful on screen. Overall, the Empty Home has enough pathos, poignancy and sad absurdity to make it an interesting film.

I liked this film very much. The cultural contexts of all the participating countries have been reflected in the film without hampering the spirit of the story. The narrative follows through the life, dreams and realities of the Kirghiz girl Ascel who travels from her homeland to Moscow in an attempt to make her dreams come true - and to that end sells her child to a French woman - but who finally faces the cruellest realities of life on the endless cross-roads she encounters. The film deserves to be shown in different festivals worldwide.

Premendra Mazumder is Vice President of the Federation of Film Societies of India and India Correspondent at Cannes Critics Week. He was a member of the jury at the 10th Almaty International Film Festival "Shaken's Stars", in Kazakhstan, where the film won the Best Director prize in June 2012.