CAPITAL
“We’re all newcomers here. Where we come from there are no jobs, here there are,” says a young boy recently arrived in Astana to find work building Kazakhstan’s utopian capital city. The film begins as the city prepares to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Zhan and Tilgen are building the city’s newest monument, a marble column topped by a 9-ton golden bird. Across the street is a towering glass and steel Pyramid where Asel and Alia guide visitors on a tour of Astana’s future. Like most in Astana, their lives are spent in service of the President’s vision of Astana as a city that will propel Kazakhstan onto the world stage.
As the anniversary nears, the global financial crisis hits, leaving the future of Kazakhstan’s dream city uncertain. “Without credit, there is no construction,” Tilgen says, looking down from his window onto another worksite that has been frozen indefinitely. Nearby, Asel turns down her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. “When I tell the girls back home that I’m dating a guy from Astana, they assume he’s rich.” /Capital/ is the story of a city caught between an official vision of the future and the reality of life on utopia's outskirts.