The Last Stop

Director: Serik Aprimov
Screenwriters: Serik Aprimov

Institute History

  • 1990 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Returning from the army to his native Aksuat, a small, decrepit village on the desolate Kazakh plains, a young man develops a jarring new perspective on the life he has always known. In seemingly random episodes, fragments of his daily life in the severe, impoverished conditions are presented with unvarnished, documentary like realism: a reunion between the young man and his buddies; his old girlfriend being berated by her tyrannical supervisor for stopping to talk with him while repairing an adobe building; his attendance at a wedding celebration with predictable drunken brawls; and his witnessing of an intoxicated man firing on local police from a rooftop. The immediacy and naturalism of these scenes is so startling it borders on surrealism. What emerges is a powerful, dark portrait of life in rural Kazakhstan that casts along shadow on the dreams of socialism.

Director Serik Aprimov is a native of Aksuat, and the entirely nonprofessional cast is made up of his friends, neighbors and relatives. The Last Stop has generated strong protest from the Communist party of the Aksuat district, and therefore has not yet been released in the Soviet Union.



Monday, January 22, 10:15 a.m.
Holiday Village Cinema II

Sunday, January 28, 11:30 8.m.
Holiday Village Cinema I

$5.00

— Forrest Ciesol

Screening Details

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