Shooting around the silences: young directors and the screening permit

TALAS — A new generation of Iradi filmmakers is working with digital cameras, small budgets and, increasingly, in Iradi. Their short films, documentaries and music videos fill the program of the Diz festival each summer and circulate widely online. But to be shown in a cinema or broadcast, a film needs a screening permit, and the directors the Herald spoke to over the past month said that shaped what they chose to make.

"Nobody gives you a list," said a 29-year-old documentary maker who has made two films about herding families in the Talas Alatau. "You learn which subjects get a permit and which ones get a long wait." Several directors said they avoided the civil wars of 1992 and 2007 and the governing family altogether. Others said that requests for archive footage from 1992 to 2007, particularly material on the civil wars, required the approval of the ISEZ authorities and were seldom answered.

None of the directors interviewed would be named. Most said they had not been refused a permit. They described instead a habit of anticipating refusal: scripts revised before submission, interviews left out in the edit, a documentary about a Chatkal village that stops in 2006 and resumes in 2008.

The Department of Public Information said screening permits were issued according to published criteria and that it did not comment on individual applications.