The Last Provocateur: An Interview with Beknur Karimov

TALAS — Beknur Karimov receives visitors in a studio in Talas cluttered with felt offcuts, carpet fragments and cans of Soviet industrial film bought by the kilogram. At 63 he no longer makes features. He has not made one since Kyz Bulak (Maiden's Spring), the 1982 film that Goskino shelved when he refused to cut its explicit scenes, and that cost him his post at Talasfilm and his right to direct at any Soviet studio. He spent the rest of the 1980s painting and working as a night watchman at a museum in what was then Kobozev.

Since 1992 he has made low-budget video works, splicing found footage of Soviet factories with felt and carpet patterns, and shown them in galleries here and in Almaty. Meanwhile bootleg tapes of his 1977 film Zalmax's Dominion, his Iradi remake of John Boorman's Zardoz, have made him a cult figure among students in Talas and Nurzhan.

IradOne has never broadcast any of his films. Asked why, Karimov smiled. "Their unsuitability for families," he said. "I have always been very consistent about that."

He does not dispute the phrase he used of himself at a meeting of the Talasfilm artistic council in 1981, "pervert of the screen". "They thought it was a confession," he said. "It was a job description."