SIFF: The Wounded Angel

Description

Award-winning director Emir Baigazin (Harmony Lessons) returns with a quartet of poignant and nuanced tales about teenage boys in impoverished 1990s Kazakhstan struggling to find their way in a world of moral uncertainties.

Winner of the 2013 SIFF New Director Award for his film Harmony Lessons, Emir Baigazin returns with his second feature, a portrait of 1990s youth in rural Kazakhstan. The ’90s was a terrible time of crisis in the former Soviet republics: no electricity, overpopulated orphanages, and constant crime. In The Wounded Angel, Baigazin creates four moral tales about boys who survived those brutal times: Balapan, a victim of bullying; Zharas, whose father is a thief; Zhaba, who collects scrap metal, and Aslan; who fears his medical studies will be compromised by his girlfriend’s pregnancy. After each section, Baigazin exhibits a section of Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg’s frescoes in the Tampere Cathedral in Finland. In fact, “The Wounded Angel” is the name of Simberg’s most famous painting. Baigazin explains, “I respect and know a lot of big names in cinema, but I get my inspiration more from the fine arts—from paintings rather than any directors in particular.”Harmony Lessons, and The Wounded Angel  are the first two parts of Baigazin’s planned trilogy about teenagers and their complex relationships with the world.

Director Biography: Born in 1984 in Kazakhstan, Emir Baigazin studied at the acting school of the T. Akhtanov Aktobe Drama Theater and the Kazakh National Academy of Arts. The Wounded Angel   won the International Arte Prize during the Berlinale co-Production Market 2014.