Kyz ala kachuu

Attended this at Gothenburg Film Festival and this was my first Kyrgyz film.

Introductions of the main characters is smooth and the plot takes time to unfold. However, the male character is quite onedimensional, you don't really get to know him or his true motives.

Akak Berdibekova is very impressive, especially in the grittier scenes.

The kidnapping itself is a masterful scene with incredible innovative film technique and the aftermath reminds me of the mob in movie Moolaadé.

The final scene is one of the most haunting and brutal endings I've seen and will stay in my mind for a long time.

I am not from Kyrgyzstan, so I can't really speak to the veracity of the story, but at the same time, this is something that actually still happens in the region.

I should also say that I do seek out movies specifically from regions you wouldn't normally see movies from. So, with that in mind, I might be kinder to movies from places many people couldn't even find on a map (it would take me a bit of thinking before I would be able to find Kyrgyzstan, but I know it used to be a part of USSR and I know it's next to China, so that leaves very few possibilities).

The movie is quite bluntly about what it says on the title. At the same time, the actual deed happens very far along the movie, but there is a series of events leading up to it.

In this regard the script is pretty clumsy. Our main character is just living her life while the eventual bad guys are plotting their son's life, which just happens to be at her expense.

The clumsiness doesn't really matter. In a way the time we spend with her is a positive as it does make her more sympathetic, but anyone in her situation would be.

What really works here is the depiction of how all of this is seen as fine by the people involved. They just lie to themselves and to others to justify their actions. They are as interested in finding a servant as they are in finding a wife for their son.

Despite the faults, this is a very good movie. They didn't try to make an Oscar-contender or a clone of a Hollywood drama. They just wanted to tell this particular story of how women are seen as a commodity and how the society fails them.