From the film "The Light Thief"
At the end of July 2011, ‘The Light Thief’ opened in London after several months of wrangling since its selection successes at the Cannes, Locarno, Berlin and the Toronto Film Festivals in 2010. The film is by award-winning Kyrgyz director Aktan Arym Kubat. This may be the first time you have heard of Kyrgyzstan or that it had a film industry at all – your mistake!
The plot follows ‘Mr Light’, an affable electrician in a remote village in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. He aims to bring cheap wind power to his rural community but change comes when local magnate Bezkat offers to sell the locals’ land to a group of Chinese investors. Juxtaposing tradition and development, the film is a poetic and visually ravishing allegory of life in post-Soviet central Asia. This precis doesn’t really convey the unusual and un-westernised mood of the film, which will make demands of an audience not cogniscent with goats, yurts and the Kyrgyz taste in traditional headgear (the ‘Kalpak’). Whilst the geography and culture are radically different from the UK, the issues of introducing new technologies to communities and administrations are decidedly familiar for those involved in introducing renewable energy initiatives.
For more information on wind power in Kyrgyzstan click here…
