La Chute d'Otrar

It is a war movie set in a pre-modern world during the Middle Ages when the world's most powerful empire, the Mongolian Empire, conquered the world.

Naturally, this war and historical movie was made in Kazakhstan, the brother country of Mongolia.

As a war movie, it does an amazing job of showing cavalry warfare.

The armor, helmets, and swords are very cool.

It also features a lot of large-scale cavalry battles, making it one of the best war movies for men who like cavalry.

The Scimitar, the military and cavalry sword of the Mongol Empire, is also featured heavily.

It"s a great war movie.

An amalgam of influences ranging from "Ivan the Terrible" (gloom-filled court intrigues) to "Andrei Rublev" (horses and grisly executions) to "Conan the Barbarian" (exotic sex scene), with quite a lot of Kurosawa (an array of Toshiro Mifune character types from the various stages of his career) thrown in as well - making a unique whole. Inexplicably shot on both color and black and white stock with little transitional logic. At times threatening to lapse into incoherence, but never quite abandoning the audience. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Amirkulov must have been enjoying almost total artistic freedom: as evidenced by the near-constant violence, a good deal of nudity, and plenty of religious discussion, no censorship of any kind has been imposed by the state.

Amazingly enough, this is an altogether compelling, thought-provoking and even historically accurate (more so than "Gladiatior", at any rate) picture. Some background in Ghengis Khan's 13th century conquests does help understand the proceedings, but is not necessary. If anything, do the research after the film (like I did) and see it again (like I hopefully will if it's ever released in a digital format). Given the very limited budget of the filmmakers, some of what they achieved here is truly impressive (and surely more authentic and heartfelt than any latest computer-generated imagery).

I actually had high hopes for this movie when watching it in the cinema at a film festival in Copenhagen, the director Amirkulov was also present at the viewing, so it felt like a special occasion. And it surely isnt every day one is given the opportunity to shake a director from Kasakhstan in the hand. The movie itself revolved around some historical battles and politics which are really unknown for me, and even though mr Amirkulov pointed out before the film began that we in the audience could expect some obscure historical talk in the film, i was surprised about the lack of many things in the movie. A lot of ideas are tested in the movie, but everything feels like the movie tried so hard to be great, that it fell apart. Bad editing, and often dull cinematography made the interest fall apart. I would suggest finding some reading material about the historical facts about the fall of Otrar, than wasting 3 hours watching this overlong film.

It's been about 10 years since I saw this movie (I saw it shortly before it came out) -- it's about the conquest of the town of Otrar, in central Asia, by the Mongols in the Middle Ages. It's something like four hours long, but it's good. Dialogue is in Kazakh.

Also, Ardak Amirkulov is one of the directors of the "New Kazakh Wave." This is a group of Kazakh directors who studied under the Russian filmmaker Sergei Solovyov (director of The House Under the Starry Sky (Dom pod zvyodznym nebom) (1991)), and includes Yermek Shinarbayev, who directed the interesting movie Revenge (Mest) (1989).

Everybody (with an interest in the topic) knows the Mongol conquest of Khoresm (that is of everything to the West of China) started with a Mongol caravan which got pillaged by uncle of Khoresm Shah in Otrar. Well, here we are told what exactly had happened and how the Mongols really had it coming and how it really wasn't the fault of Central Asian Turks. Now Central Asia got it's own Andrey Rublyov movie. Yeah!