Kazakhstan focuses on French cinema with UniFrance

The 7th edition of the French Cinema Today in Kazakhstan event will take place in Almaty, the country's cultural capital, from April 21 through 24, 2016.

This festival initiated by Unifrance presents a selection of preview screenings of French films that have all been acquired by Russian distributors (who continue to acquire rights to foreign films in the former Soviet states) and are subsequently sold to Kazakh distributors. It is these distributors who are thus behind this eclectic lineup of six feature films, which encompasses a representative cross-section of French filmmaking from 2014 and 2015.
Moviegoers in Kazakhstan, like those throughout the former USSR, have grown up on French films, and each year extend a warm welcome to this event. The festival is supported locally by the French Embassy and the Alliance Française and, in the words of the local media, now stands out as the country's 2nd biggest movie event (after the Eurasia Festival). Now in its 7th year, the festival is co-organized by the Arman Cinema, which also operates as a distribution company and is one of the few distributors in Kazakhstan to offer wide visibility to French films, and European films in general.

Despite the absence of official movie industry statistics in Kazakhstan, we can nonetheless note that this nation, which is five times the size of France, offers spectators around 240 high-standard movie screens, with cinema attendance reaching between 12 and 14 million annually (for a population of around 18 million) and over 300 new films released in theaters each year (of which around one tenth are French titles).

The presentation of these six features films—along with two programs of short films—will be accompanied by the presence of the directors of Paris-Willouby, Arthur Delaire and Quentin Reynaud, as well as Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, lead actor of Francofonia by Alexandre Sokurov.