Kazakhstan, naissance d'une nation
Christian Barani, Guillaume Reynard
2008 - 65 min - Digital vidéo - Couleur - France

In 1998, seven years after the independence of the country, the autocratic Kazahk president Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to move the capital city Almaty to Astana, in the northern steppes. Vertiginous towers spring out of the ground, financed by oil exports. The film opens with a presidential speech in 1997 on the future of Kazakhstan, boasting to "the three layers of society, the rich, the middle class and the poor" of the infinite promise of the free market.
Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard observe the life of a new society, in the standardised and gaudy trappings of wealth. Seeking to represent  "fiction, which in each scene, seems to have preceded reality", as in a film by director Darejan Omirbaev, they also venture backstage, from a hut on a building site to a little house about to be demolished. Through an ex-Soviet oligarchy in full expansion, a melancholy and poetic portrait of globalization.