[Review] The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991. An Uneasy Legacy. Lanham, MD & London: Lexington Books, 2021, by Peter Rollberg

THE SOVIET ERA OF KAZAKH FILMMAKING HAS BEEN POORLY STUDIED to date, with no volume covering the entire period. Kazakhstani cinephiles will welcome Peter Rollberg’s volume, which reveals the complex, rich and distinct world of cinema that developed in Kazakhstan throughout the Soviet era. In the conventional account of Soviet cinema in Kazakhstan, the film industry emerged in the 1920s with newsreels and short documentaries. Cinematic works appeared in the 1930s but only under the tutelage of Russian filmmakers and studios. During the war, the move of most Soviet film production to Alma-Ata saw the growth of technical expertise in the Kazakh republic. A genuine sense of ‘Kazakh’ cinema, however, only emerged in the 1950s, reaching its full creative potential by the early 1970s. Subsequently, and until the renaissance of the Kazakh ‘New Wave’ in the late 1980s, the industry became stuck in a cultural and commercial milieu. Rollberg follows this general narrative across 12 in-depth chapters, providing a fresh perspective and challenging familiar tropes about the cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan