Inzhu Abeu

1992, the country is in economic chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kasym Isagaliyev, the director of a successful construction holding, decides to enter the oil industry at the suggestion of a geologist partner — to obtain a license for two fields that the state has declared unprofitable. He faces a number of challenges: difficulties in securing funding, tough negotiations with investors, lack of experience in the new field, and competitors who have no intention of staying on the sidelines. Moreover, there is no 100 % guarantee that the disputed fields contain sufficient oil reserves.

Crickets, It’s Your Turn is a darkly absurd feminist parable in which a young photographer’s private theatre of imagination begins to invade reality. Merey enters a mountain house governed by hierarchy, male solidarity and the logic of the strongest. She follows another logic: beauty, play and creation. Through white-room tableaux, grotesque humour and deliberate ruptures between realism and theatre, an ordinary gathering becomes a study of collective complicity. The danger comes not from a single monster, but from reasonable men who protect one another until violence becomes ceremony.