Archive · 2023 · From the print edition of Monday 2 October 2023, Vol. 31, No. 9,565
CultureFilm festival audiences fall again
The Irad Film Society blames lost sponsorship and travel difficulties; critics point to a program still built around Russian-language cinema.
TALAS — Admissions to last month's Talas International Film Festival fell again, and fewer foreign guests attended than at the last edition in 2021, the Irad Film Society said on Saturday.
The society did not publish a final count, but said admissions were well under half the 62,000 recorded in 2005, the festival's best year, when the restored Desert Sun's Rebellion opened the program. Several weekday screenings in the cinemas of Cinema Boulevard played to fewer than twenty people.
The society attributed the decline to reduced corporate sponsorship and to travel difficulties caused by Irad's unresolved international status, which it said had again deterred several invited guests from abroad. "Every festival we spend more of our time on visas and less on films," a member of the society's board said.
Critics point to the program instead. A large section of this year's festival was again given to Russian-language films from Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, at a time when younger audiences in Talas increasingly watch films in English and Iradi. Many of them now go to the Diz festival in the citadel courtyards each summer instead.