After Borat, Kazakhstan’s Cinema Dreams

The set of , two hours north of Almaty, feels like a Hollywood production. The director, Akan Satayev, is shooting the penultimate scene of his war epic in a dusty bowl surrounded by rocky hills, a river, and a fiberglass fortress where the bad guys, the Dzhungars, live. A cameraman is wearing a T-shirt that says “Stupid People Shouldn’t Breathe”; tattooed production assistants toss empty water bottles on the ground; an anorexic makeup artist screams at an extra in rust-colored pantaloons. Meanwhile, Satayev says he wants to reshoot the same 30-second stitch of film for the umpteenth time, and the camera, mounted on a strip of rail, starts following a clutch of Kazakh warriors as they prepare for battle. Then Satayev, who watches on two monitors inside an air-conditioned RV, whispers into a walkie-talkie that he’d like another take.

Later, at a Soviet-era casino that the crew has temporarily taken over, Satayev explains why he must get his picture—and his ending—just right. “We’re in a boom time,” he says. “Everyone in the former Soviet Union knows the film business here is very robust.” Indeed, between 2007 and 2010, the number of Kazakh new releases quintupled—from 2 to 10. As a result, expectations have risen, too: With a budget of $7 million, (“The Thousand Boys”) will be the most expensive movie in Kazakh history. It’s a gamble that producer Aliya Uvalzhanova is willing to take. Uvalzhanova thinks Satayev is “a genius”—a rare director capable of turning Almaty into the Hollywood of Central Asia. And , she believes, will be his greatest triumph yet. That’s why it’s been slated for release on Dec. 16, Kazakhstan’s own version of the July 4 tent pole weekend.