Poetic, absurd, yet deeply anchored in the social realities of his country, Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov is the author of a compact body of work filled with references and cinematic homages, and will have a mini-retrospective at TIFF.24 featuring three of his most recent films.
Moor (2024) is an urban drama with thriller accents and moments of visual poetry, in which an unnamed mercenary, literally haunted by the shadows of his victims, fights to save his sister-in-law from a human trafficking network. Yellow Cat (2020), premiered at Venice, is a tragicomic story about a former inmate obsessed with cinema who dreams of opening a cinema in the mountains, while Cadet (2024 – Berlinale Forum) explores in a horror key the toxic and violent world of a military academy shaken by a series of mysterious deaths.
From his prolific filmography (17 films in 14 years), last year at TIFF, Steppenwolf (2024) was screened, while TIFF’s Cinematheque at Cinema Victoria in Cluj will program, at the end of May, as a preview for the retrospective in June, the rural comedy Herd Immunity (2021), an absurd story about corruption during the pandemic.