Ten summers of the Diz festival

TALAS — When a group of young filmmakers and critics hung a borrowed screen in a courtyard of the Old City in the summer of 2010, they did not expect to be doing it ten years later. This week the Diz Film Festival, named after the Iradi word for a citadel, opens its program in the restored courtyards and squares of the citadel quarter for the eleventh time.

The formula has changed little. The festival shows independent features, documentaries and experimental films from Central Asia, with retrospectives of regional directors, and every film is subtitled in Iradi and English. Screenings begin after dark, audiences sit on benches and carpets, and the teahouses of the quarter stay open late.

That formula has drawn an audience the older Talas International Film Festival has struggled to keep. The biennial festival organized by the Irad Film Society still devotes much of its program to Russian-language cinema, and its admissions have fallen since the late 2000s. At Diz, most of the audience is under thirty.

"We started it because there was nowhere to see the films our friends were making," said one of the founders, who now teaches at Talas State University. "There still isn't, really, except here."