Ayka

Low key documentary recording the daily life of an elderly blind man in Russia.

Asa, a young and cheerful dreamer, returns from his Russian naval service to his sister’s nomadic family on the desolate Hunger Steppe of central Asia, so that he can begin his own life as a shepherd. But before he can tend a flock of his own, Asa must first win the hand of the only eligible girl for miles—his mysterious neighbor, Tulpan.

Sergey Dvortsevoy makes his international debut with this astonishingly intimate portrait of a nomadic family on the Kazakh plains. Several scenes in this slow, elegant film betray a certain dry humor -- a child devouring the last of a bowl of yogurt and then crying; a cow getting its head stuck in a pail; and a woman singing to herself, accompanied by her snoring husband. Other scenes capture the nomads' hardscrabble lives -- drunken herdsmen in the grips of existential despair, growling dogs, and a camel enduring a rather grim septum piercing. By the end of the film, the family pulls up stakes and herds its sundry four-legged beasts -- camels, cattle, goats, dogs, and horses -- to a more fertile plain. This film was screened at the 1999 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

The highway of the title is a 2,000 mile dirt road in Kazakhstan. Along this route, a traveling family circus journeys in their crowded hand-cranked bus, stopping in villages. The filmmaker accompanies the Tadjibajevs, capturing their quarrels, performances, and intimate moments.

Depicts a community of pensioners living in near isolation outside of St. Petersberg as it enacts the weekly ritual of bringing a delivery of bread—left at a rail junction two hours away—into the village for distribution.