The first Kazakhstani film on the Netflix platform
The first Kazakhstani documentary "Sea Tomorrow" directed by Katerina Suvorova will be released on Netflix. The tape is currently only available for viewing in Europe and the United States. In the CIS countries, viewers will be able to see it in the near future.
"Sea Tomorrow" is a full-length film about the disappearance of the Aral Sea and, first of all, about people who live on the shores of a dried-up reservoir. “A fisherman who has nothing to catch. A gardener who grows trees in the salt desert. A hydro-biologist studying the bottom of a dried-up sea. Pirates living on the ruins of ships, taking them apart for scrap. They all found a job, meaning and life in a world where the worst has already happened. The sea is gone ... Maybe someday it will return,”- so it says in the description of the film.
The world premiere of the film took place in 2016 at the Locarno festival. In the same year she won the prize of the Guild of Film Critics of Kazakhstan "For Contribution to the Development of Cinematography." A year later, the film "Sea Tomorrow" was nominated for the best film at the "Tulpar" film award. The film was highly appreciated abroad as well. So, in 2017, he received the "Prize of Anthropology and Sustainable Development" at the Jean Rush International Festival in Paris. The film was also bought by several international TV channels.
The main director’s goal was to break the stereotypes that the Aral Sea is the place left by life, because this is not the case at all. People live, work there, love their small homeland. And the idea of the film was precisely to tell not about an environmental catastrophe, but about the life of people in the aftermath of this catastrophe.
Representatives of Russian streaming platforms, for example, KinoPoisk and Okko, are also negotiating now. They say that entering these platforms will significantly speed up the process of the picture appearance on Netflix for the CIS countries.
The director says that now her main goal is to prove that documentary cinema is exactly the area that needs to be developed. It is in demand in the global film industry, and many countries are ready to finance it. In Kazakhstan, very few market participants view documentary material as a serious investment. Suvorova hopes this news will prove to all participants of Kazakhstan film industry that it’s a very promising area for investment.
Author: Moldir Adamzhan
Translator: Chingiz Smakov
Photo: from open sources