There’s a lot of blood in Kazakh director Aitor Giordascali’s solo debut, Sicko. The film, a hard-boiled crime thriller about internet fraud gone awry, will be shown at Transylvania International Airport this week. Film festival.
Written by Zoldascari, Kazibek Orazbek, and Ardiyar Zaparkhanov, “Sicko” follows a cash-strapped couple who create a get-rich-quick scheme to pay off their mounting debts. With the help of an unscrupulous lab assistant, they faked a terminal illness and started crowdfunding for a “life-saving” treatment, which quickly went viral.
Their rapid rise to fame and fortune initially seems like a dream come true, but soon their celebrity attracts the attention of Almaty’s criminal underworld, and their plans spin out of control and into a dangerous direction.
“Sicko” stars Ayan Utepbergen and Dilnaz Kurmangali as the scheming couple, and was produced by Kuanish Beisekov, Anna Kachko, Ashkat Shumanov and Almas Zari. The film had its international premiere in the Bright Future Competition section of the International Film Festival. The Rotterdam Film Festival was held following the blockbuster theatrical release in Kazakhstan. Loco Films will handle worldwide sales.
According to Zuldaskari’s own admission, “Sicko” “started as a joke” after he and his co-writers increasingly came across articles about internet fraud in Kazakhstan. The trio envisioned a gory black comedy that explores how far a desperate man will go to survive at the intersection of late capitalism and the attention economy, where viral fame and fortune are just a few clicks away.
“It was important to understand why this happens to normal people,” he says. “There are a lot of people that we see every day on the news who are going to kill their friends, rob their friends, commit moral crimes, do evil things. It was important for us to understand where that came from.”
“Sicko” offers blood and gore through and through, which, combined with a steady helping of social satire, is why it’s been compared to Korean genre films. (Director Giordascali, who admits to having a weakness for “ultra-violent” films, counts Korean films among his many influences.)
But whether or not you consider “Sicko” to be a version of Kazakhstan’s “Parasite,” Zuldaskaly argues that the film is actually a toned-down version of the world it depicts. “In my opinion, this movie is less violent than life,” says the director, noting that some of Sicko’s most gruesome and absurd plot twists are drawn from real news articles. “There are many things to fear in life.”
Zuldascali did not follow a simple path to filmmaking. Raised in a strict household with a father who prioritized his son’s graduation from college, he found himself in a corner when he tried to fulfill his film ambitions. His father kicked him out of the house – “It was winter, I left the house in flip-flops,” the director says – and Zoldascari was left to fend for himself, “taking whatever pictures I could,” armed with a camera he had bought with money he had saved from his part-time job.
‘Sicko’ stars Ayan Utepbergen and Dilnaz Kulmangari
Provided by: Transylvania Film Festival
Over time, he says, he raised his profile by making music videos and posting short-form content on social media, striving to establish an identity “as a visual filmmaker and as a creative artist.” His big break came at the age of 23, when a producer offered him to host an upcoming TV show on Instagram. The series was to be shot on a limited budget, but he eventually learned that the budget was so large that most of his colleagues passed on the show. But for Zoldascari, “it was a huge opportunity.”
“Shekel,” about a desperate college student who turns to drug trafficking to pay for his studies, was a huge hit in Kazakhstan, attracted some 200 million viewers from across the CIS region, won an award for best short drama in Busan, and was screened in the Cannes series in 2022. It was followed by Schlammer, co-directed with Igor Tsai, about three friends trying to make it big as rappers in Almaty.
Now making his solo debut, “Sicko” marks Zholdaskali’s biggest swing yet. The film received an enthusiastic response in its home country and was shown in Rotterdam, where it grossed more than $2 million last fall, despite being hit with a poor 21+ audience rating. This measure effectively limited showtimes to between 10pm and 6am.
The release marks the latest example of the domestic industry continuing to expand its share of the domestic box office while winning praise overseas as well. Zuldaskaly is part of a generation of promising young Kazakh filmmakers, including Berlinale Prize winners Askar Uzabayev (Happiness), Ashat Kuchinchirekov (Adoption) and Aysultan Seytov (Hunger), who have evoked echoes of the Kazakh New Wave, the independent post-Soviet film movement that emerged during the fall of the Soviet Union four decades ago.
Does Zurdaskari think his country could be on the cusp of a new Kazakh new wave?
“I don’t really believe in waves, but I think there are a lot of opportunities for us as filmmakers,” he says. “There are new AI technologies that offer more freedom. There are many options on how to implement them, which gives us real freedom and a real opportunity to step up quickly into the international market at a different level that was not possible before.”
Zoldaskari recently partnered with AI startup Higgsfield to direct the action fantasy Hell Grind, which he co-wrote with Adilkhan Yerzhanov. Higgsfield said the piece was created entirely on the company’s platform for $500,000 and was completed in just two weeks.
Zoldaskari cited the film as an example of the “large-scale democratization of the filmmaking process (creating more opportunities)” in Kazakhstan. “I don’t like talking about waves, because at the moment it’s about dreams, big dreams,” he added. “I think there’s a lot of work to be done before it can be called a ‘wave.’ But we’re already getting there.”
The Transylvania International Airport Film Festival will be held from June 12th to 21st.
