Kulpash: A Foreign Film as Heartbreaking as Requiem for a Dream
Based on a short story by Beimbet Maylin, the feature-length foreign film Kulpash follows a family struggling to survive during a famine in the artic desert of 20th century Kazakhstan. The livestock have been confiscated by the authorities, with the implicit promise that the government would ration the resources on behalf of all its citizens and distribute the goods as needed.
But the people are left to fend for themselves.
As the movie opens, Maktym (Erkabulan Daiyrov) trudges across the white nothingness (such a convincing landscape that I worried about the actors!), braving the freezing winds with no trees or even houses to protect him on his journey home. He stops by his uncle’s place, where his aging great aunt cannot even sit up, she is so old and weak and cold. The uncle asks Maktym to spare some of his bounty, a sack of grain, but what can he do? Say no to his starving relatives? After Maktym doles out a few handfuls, the uncle gives him a few branches of firewood in return. As the two men talk, the camera pans to the roof, where we see a space in the latches, too wide to be considered a hole—an open window to the harsh elements.
Maktym completes his trek home to his wife, Kulpash (Gulmira Khasanova), and their son, who has a persistent wet cough. Before Maktym’s return, the two sat huddled on a makeshift bed in a permanent structure of some kind—with just one room, no decoration or color, and indeed, almost no furniture, I wouldn’t call it a house—shivering beneath an animal-skin blanket, their eyes vacant with misery. Kulpash unwrapped a cloth and found, deeply burned within its folds, a morsel of kurt; taking some on her fingertip, she slips it under her son’s tongue and advises him to suck on it. She takes a few crumbs to her own tongue and relishes the flavor. When Maktym comes home with grain and firewood, the family almost rejoices: Tonight they have something to eat, and tonight they will be warm. After finishing his bowl of grain and warm water, the son asks if there’s more, and Kulpash and Maktym give him bites from their own spoons.
Complicated feelings arose in me in this scene: On the one hand, how heartwarming to see two parents love their son more than themselves, how humbling to be reminded that people can find gratitude when granted almost nothing—but also how devastating. How heartbreaking. No one should have to live like this.
Right from the beginning, this movie deviates from some of the details in Maylin’s short story: In the film, we focus on Maktym’s journey as he works to gather resources for his family, while in the short story, the family still has one horse left to them, but after thieves steal it, Kulpash must travel to nearby villages to beg for food for her and her family. In the short story, we may get the impression that Kulpash is the only one trying to improve her family’s circumstances, but that point of view cannot be justified through the camera’s lens.
One central element remains the same: Kulpash’s half sister Raushan (Makhabbat Sarkytbayeva) visits her to beg her to abandon her husband. She tells Kulpash that a rich, elderly man has maintained an interest in her, even all these years later after she married Maktym, whom the man calls a thief—perhaps only because he “stole” Kulpash away from him. He would still marry her, even now, and if she obliged him, she would have reliable shelter, enough food to overcome not only starvation but even simple hunger, and enough warmth to banish the chill from her bones. Kulpash doesn’t want to have this conversation, at first. She’s miserable, and she’s suffering, but this is her family after all.
By the second time her sister broaches the topic, Kulpash has gotten a bit more desperate. Her son is not doing well. But she cannot take him with her; after all, he’s a “thief’s son.” But her half sister assures her that, once she’s in the house with this suitor, she can convince him to bring her son later on.
Kulpash is forced by horrible circumstances to make a Sophie’s Choice: Stay loyal to her family at the cost of their lives, or leave them behind in search of her own survival.
This movie is so bleak that, by the end of Act I, I had to pause it and cry. I’d compare it to Les Misérables, which made me sob nonstop when I saw it for the first time in theaters, but at least the actors sing you little songs in that movie and smile sometimes; I had the luxury of a soundtrack to keep me company while my tears salted my popcorn. The level of sadness this movie brought me was closer to Requiem for a Dream—a movie that is art, a movie that deserved all of the awards it received, and a movie that crushed me so completely to my core that I will never watch it again.
But through cinema, we can experience a wide range of emotions, so a film that can make you feel, even a bad feeling, is an excellent movie. Well done, director and screenwriter Akan Satayev. Well done to the actors who fully convinced me that their lives were on the line, who inspired a hatred in me for the government that let them down—that let down the three million real people who died during the historical famine.
Well done.