OTVERGNUTYE

Family trees are being drawn at school. The blackboard is not big enough for the others, but Timur's tree just consists of Mama & me. Aiganym, his mother, once went to the city to study; a man desired her, but did not want to marry her. She is now considered to be a whore by the family "at home". And yet she wants to go back, also for her son Timur’s benefit. The outcasts constantly come and stand together at the garden fence, asking – contrary to all the circumstances – for forgiveness. However, this fails to materialise, what’s more: she receives brutal blows from her mother and her brother in front of the child who then closes his mouth completely, maybe forever.

Issabayeva's radically anti-patriarchal cinema is characterized by an unbearable harshness and coldness befalling her characters – both actively and passively. The ballad REJECTED sees her focus taking in the constraints of man in a society which is about raising money, nepotism and the law of the jungle. And ideas about masculinity that are ruinous. BW