Kyrgyz–Kazakh Film Quintet: education, form, and the politics of knowing

• In Event: Form as Praxis: Aesthetics, Affect, and Dialogue in Comparative & International Education

Proposal

In a climate where global geopolitics narrows what can be said and heard, cinema offers room to think. This quintet reads Central Asia’s passage from Soviet schooling to post-Soviet unravelling and contemporary reconfigurations through form as pedagogy: how images, sound, rhythm, and space teach us to notice bias—whose knowledge counts, who is silenced, and how institutions script lives. As Irv Epstein suggests, film’s affective address is pedagogical—our viewing is a lesson in how to know. I pair that insight with David MacDougall’s “social aesthetics” to read schools, rites, and bureaucracies as sites of learning, and aesthetic form as a method of critique.
1) The First Teacher (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1965)
A Komsomol teacher founds a village school, staging Soviet modernisation against local power. Education appears as civilising mission and discipline. Crowd blocking and lyrical long shots show how images manufacture consent and dissent, training the eye to read the classroom as state craft—education as civilizing mission and discipline.
2) Beshkempir / The Adopted Son (Aktan Abdykalykov/Aktan Arym Kubat, 1998)
After 1991, socialisation replaces formal schooling: elders, gossip, labour, initiation rites become the ‘curriculum’. Minimalist framing and textured sound mark everyday learning when institutions thin out—what still counts as ‘education’ once the Soviet timetable disappears?
3) Harmony Lessons (Emir Baigazin, 2013)
A rural secondary school operates as a micro-state. Geometric compositions, controlled sound, and held duration refuse sentimentality, sharpening attention to the hidden syllabus—surveillance, shame, and the calculus of survival—as bullying and petty graft instruct the young in power’s grammar.
4) Rejected (Qaírylmady) (Zhanna Issabayeva, 2018)
A single mother and her son confront a classroom assignment—‘draw your family tree’—that quietly encodes normative kinship and reproduces stigma. Static framing, plain light, and unadorned diegetic sound let institutional routine do the talking, turning pedagogy into social sorting and revealing how schooling measures family status as much as learning.
5) Ademoka’s Education (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, 2022)
An undocumented Tajik (Lyuli) teenager seeks access to school. Restrained realism and an unobtrusive camera render paperwork as fate: IDs, files, and checkpoints enact a quiet pedagogy of belonging, as modernization promises mobility yet withholds it through status and category.
Taken together, the films move from the school as Soviet tool and promise to the 1990s’ unravelling and the reconstitution of ethno-national frames of belonging. They end in a present where institutions offer openings yet close them by gender, ethnicity, and legal status. The quintet is offered as aesthetic pedagogy: not policy case studies, but formal inquiries that slow judgement and surface our epistemic habits. Working in MacDougall’s key—and extending Epstein’s claim that affect and form are central to pedagogy—the session asks what we recognise as evidence, whom we centre as knowers, and how medium shapes meaning when discourse itself is constrained.

Author

• Hugh McLean, NORRAG