CINEMA AS BRANDING - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 185

society defines itself? This kind of analysis, engaging the issues of power
and culture and problematizing the relationship between the local and the
global, lends contemporary relevance to the story of Ablai. Perhaps for
some individuals in Kazakhstan including Imangali Tasmagambetov, one
of the closest allies of President Nazarbaev who was involved in the film
as a history advisor, it was dangerously relevant.
CINEMATIC VERSION OF ABLAI
The film starts with a bird's eyeshot of a seemingly boundless spring
blooming steppe, a landscape inviting esthetic meditation. The camera
slowly glides down towards an iconic herding encampment ( aul ) featur-
ing tents, animals, and pen enclosures, until it fills the frame. “Nomadic
Kazakhs,” the voiceover plugs in the soundtrack, “have inhabited this
vast space from the Altai Mountains to the Caspian Sea since the an-
cient times.” Casual movement of people animates the aul 's life whose
peaceful nature is intensified by the sound of dombra , a Kazakh string
instrument. Suddenly a group of armed men on horseback burst into the
camera's view, transforming the serene imagery into a war zone, and the
voiceover says that, unfortunately, the Kazakh land was always a target for
the enemy, including the Jungars. Shot in a camera-eye style, the follow-
ing scene depicts what could be the same aul turned into ashes and bones,
making a close-up to a wrecked Kazakh cradle without a baby to convey
the scale of destruction and grief. This dramatic, dark-colored scene then
dissolves exposing a cutaway with an assembly of men in regal garments
engaged in a heated debate. The narrator's voice reenters, taping over an
emotional dialog between Abulkhair khan (Ron Yuan) and Barak sultan (Erik
Zholzhaksynov), explaining that the Kazakhs lacked leadership to fight
back leaving ordinary people with a “dream of a warrior who would come
and unite Kazakhs in one strong fist and push the enemy out.” This com-
ment completes the establishing shot shaping a narrative frame of the film.
The next sequence introduces main characters. “ I was waiting for that
warrior too,” says the narrator when a lone horseback rider, Oraz (Jason
Scott Lee), comes towards the camera. His fictional character, combining
qualities of a fine swordfighter and a Sufi brother, as the film soon reveals
it, is positioned to orchestrate the events by unifying dramatic and mystic
elements in the film. Oraz's structural opposite, albeit weaker and 'incom-