SVET-AKE

Kyrgyzstan, far from the capital city. The everyday life of a small village. Primitive mines, the most genuine and kind you can imagine, are detonated in vain. What doesn't work out on a bigger scale can provide for wonderful insights in the smallest of villages however. Svet-Ake has a command of the fundamental principles of electricity, he makes light, saves children from trees at breathtaking heights and dreams of tremendous windmills and powered two-wheelers for the good of everyone. The conditions though, they're not ideal, his wife laughs at him, his daughters feel sympathy, he himself considers himself as nothing more than a plaything of the powers that be. No wonder, his boundless open-heartedness mercilessly dissipates his energies. There used to be a country. Kyrgyzstan. Administered by the Soviets for decades, domesticated, but still Kyrgyz, very much so, from the mounted hordes, hunting the billy goat, to the patriarchal illness that only permits one to feel a man when father of  a son. Who can't stand it when a naked women births a camel and a naked man can't find her vagina. Rather than a nostalgic retrospect we are served up a wonderfully charming catalogue of images that stretches from the traditional to the modern, laughing all the while in the face of present-day criminals. Shot with a light-heartedness and upbeat tempo, as if life were eternal.