Yellow Cat: with a sense of humour as dry as the landscapes it portrays, Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s film follows a former convict as he, alongside an escaped prostitute, tries to follow his dream and build a movie theater. Nothing seems to faze the colorful gallery of characters (dirty cops, movie-quoting criminals, corrupt farmers, etc): the violence and the petty crimes are all par for the course, in what is not a very flattering view of the Kazakh society. The performances are very stylized, low-key and deadpan; Azamat Nigmanov plays the simple, idealistic protagonist almost as an uncomprehended hero of this broken society; Kamila Nugmanova, as the child-like prostitute he enlists and falls in love with, has quite a striking look. Cinematographer Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev shoots the actions keeping the seemingly endless, empty, and dry plains in focus (no wonder blue and yellow are the Kazakh national colors); this is a small story happening in an immense world that doesn’t particularly care about what happens to the pair of dreamers.