Tulpan

Tulpan is a 2008 Kazakh drama film. It was directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy and distributed by Zeitgeist Films. Tulpan was Kazakhstans 2009 Academy Awards official submission to Foreign Language Film category. It won the award for Best Film at the 2nd Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Director Sergey Dvortsevoy was born in Kazakhstan, lived there foryears working for an aviation company, and was very familiar with Kazakhstans countryside. In an interview at the New York Film Festival he revealed how he had always wanted to tell a story about such a barren setting. Dvortsevoy has said that the people who live in the Hunger Steppe have always intrigued him in the interview he revealed how he has always noticed an inner balance to the people that live in this part of the world, a happiness despite subjective adversity that has always interested him. Casting for the film took many, many months, and Dvortsevoy recalls having sent crews with small cameras to nearly every city in Kazakhstan in search of the right cast members. Having found them, he made the main cast Asa, Samal, Ondas, Beke, Maha and Nuka live in the yurt depicted in the film for one month before filming. In the interview, Dvortsevoy described how the story came together,percent of the film was from his original script while the other 80 percent came about from a realtime reworked script based on the circumstances and conditions that arose on location. Dvortsevoy rehearsed all of the sequences with the animals or on the tractor, but the emotional scenes were rehearsed without dialogue and only fully performed at the time of filming. Samal, who played Asas sister and the mother of the children, was the only professional actress on set having worked on stage in the theatre, however at the time of filming she was only nineteen years old. Still only a child herself, she struggled to grow accustomed to the household chores and motherly duties during her month living in the yurt. Askhat Kuchinchirekov, the actor who portrayed Asa, was not a professional but still a student at one of the film schools in Kazakhstan. The three children were able to rehearse scenes to different degrees with the exception of Nurzhigit Zhapabayev, the little boy who played Nuka, who Dvortsevoy simply let l

Source: Wikipedia