The Light Thief

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10/30/2011 Without a bias that this movie has come from Kazakhstan , an unknown country for me, still this is sophisticated and full of beautiful and vigorous scenes. ï 1/4­r. Light man is an attractive small hero helping people who canâ(TM)t afford to pay electricity and having a passion to utilize wind power for his village. His smile always shows his warm heart with or without words. Iâ(TM)m surprised to know that Mr. Light man is a director himself ! See more 09/01/2011 I am not, in truth, much familiar with the cinematic tradition of Kyrgyzstan. This seemed an engaging enough comedy about a village electrician and rural politics. A local electrician, 'Mr Light', arranges for the poor to get free electricity and gets into trouble with the authorities. He has his own wind generator and dreams of large-scale generation. There are surprising, for us, juxtapositions - an excellent scene of two drunks sstumbling home with a bike and a horse. The village is not attractive - Soviet era low buildings - and the trains from somewhere to somewhere else speed by. This is a constant reminder that there are other, more desirable places and the locals go there - to Russia, to Italy. There was also insight into the importance of attracting Chinese businesses in underdeveloped post-Soviet Central Asia - a whole socio-political sphere which is invisible to westerners. It is when the imperative of modern needs, the all-pervading corruption, the entrenchedness of tradition and innocent but rigid idealism clash that the movie suddenly finishes with unexpected and shocking tragedy. Tragedy that you realise was edging towards the inevitable. A weird film about a culture which is quite unknown to us. A film that was unusual, intriguing, and I felt was ultimately unsatisfactory, but I'm not sure. It may be better than I think. See more Mike M 07/28/2011 At a town hall meeting we see early on, one of the more poetic contributors begins a speech with the words "we live in a valley between mountains, through which passes the wind", and if ever a film could be read as an expression of national character, "The Light Thief" would be it: forever changeable in its outlook, it's evidently the work of a cinema (that as [Ben] Hopkins illustrated [in "37 Uses for a Dead Sheep"]) is still working out the best way to gather up and tell its stories. There's a distinct choppiness about the way the hero goes from being the subject of a police inquiry to hooking up the Government headquarters, and from there to his eventual fate as a plaything for the rich. We sense the focus drifting from one sequence to the next, which - though a clear sign of a filmmaker with much to say - does occasionally leave the viewer having to chase meanings and referents. Still, the bold, widescreen imagery certainly gets in a lot of varied local colour: the, ahem, climax is a state-sponsored sex show involving a live camel, a frisky metaphor for the bondage many of the area's residents find themselves born into. (Someone, inevitably, gets the hump.) Hard to argue with co-writer/director Aktan Arym Kubat's smashing lead performance, too: modest and - yes - grounded, holding together his paperchase of a script with the most delightful, happy-making face seen on screen for several months. It remains interesting rather than essential, and insistently niche, but "The Light Thief" remains everything good, conscientious summer counterprogramming ought to be: unusual, surprising, and interested in more than noisy robots or aliens - a bracing draught of fresh air through cinemas currently choked up with hotdog and popcorn farts. See more 11/25/2010 my favourite kirgistani film See more Read all reviews

The Light Thief

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