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Bride Kidnapping Review: A Tough, Handsome, Scathing Indictment of a Barbaric Kyrgyz Cus

An optimistic young woman living on the hardscrabble outskirts of Bishkek pursues career dreams unaware that neighborhood men and women may have other plans for her.

Near the beginning and near the end of Mirlan Abdykalykov‘s beautifully made but tough-minded, enraging “Bride Kidnapping” there are literally mirroring shots of the main character, 19-year-old Umut (Akak Berdibekova). At the start, she gazes at her reflection in modest pleasure as she gets dressed: a lovely young woman, with a ready, dimpled smile, looking forward to the day and to a simple but fulfilling future as a nurse. In a matter of a few days she will be again at that wardrobe mirror, but her demeanor will be entirely changed. The title is a spoiler as to the grim fate that will intervene, and it’s one that claims an estimated 12,000 Kyrgyz women and girls every year. But even if its only effect were the extinguishing of Umut’s soft radiance, Abdykalykov’s hard-edged but intensely compassionate portrait would make that tragedy enough.

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Umut’s environment, amid the smoggy cinder-blocks and corrugated roofs of this unlovely part of outer Bishkek, is framed with unromanced elegance in Jantai Kyduraliev’s superb, academy-ratio cinematography, which finds a certain dignity through composition, no matter how squalid the circumstances. The young woman lives a poor but contented life with her mother (Guljamal Mamytbekova), who earns a meagre living selling fried bread and atkanchay (a salty Kyrgyz tea into which butter is sometimes stirred), while her father has gone abroad to Russia to work. As she leaves for work that day, an electric company rep comes to warn her that they will cut the power if the bill is not paid that day. It is not an empty threat: she passes them further down the street doing exactly that at a neighbor’s house. Most of the background conversations we overhear in this largely taciturn film are about money, or the lack of it, about rent or bills or grift. At one point, a policeman confronts the woman who runs the local sauna (Ainur Akylbek Kyzy) about its illegal emissions, when clearly he’s just angling for a bribe. 

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In parallel we are introduced to Egemen (Elchibek Shamenov) a surly, lanky local who works with the sauna owner’s husband, Azamat (Mairambek Erkegulov) doing odd-jobs of dubious legality, scavenging dumping sites for tires and felling railroad poles to sell on as firewood. Egemen is a young man, but his unmarried status is cause for concern for his hectoring family who point out that by his age, most other guys have a wife and several kids. Egeman does however have a regular hookup who as he leaves her bed one night, asks him the heartbreaking question: “If I had not been kidnapped back then, we would have been happy together, wouldn’t we?” Egeman does not reply.

Marrying her, a divorcée who already has a child, would bring dishonor on his family. Instead, Azamat insists, they will find their “handsome boy” a “girl who has never been kissed,” listing off a roll-call of potential candidates and discussing their suitability with his wife like they’re sizing up livestock. Meanwhile Umut has struck up a shy flirtation with a patient, an out-of-towner who came to the area bristling with self-righteousness to record a journalistic investigation into the cause of Bishkek’s heavy air pollution, and got beaten up for his trouble. Recuperating under her gentle care, he eventually plucks up courage to give her the gift of an apple. The men in the ward applaud. Umut carries it home like a trophy. 

Except she never reaches home. The actual kidnapping doesn’t occur until two-thirds through the film, a narrative decision that both gives us time to understand the rhythms of Umut’s daily life and also freights even the most cheerful early scenes with a sense of gathering dread. Even so, when it finally occurs, the abduction happens with a violent suddenness as shocking as Umut’s subsequent hours of pleading, protesting and physical struggle are dig-your-nails-into-your-palms tense.

Although it is Egemen and Azamat who scoop her off the street, back at Egemen’s house it is largely the womenfolk who, having drafted in an elder to consecrate the “wedding,” are tasked with subduing her — or maybe just with exhausting her spirit to the degree that when they finally send Egemen in, she will not have enough fight left in her to resist. Their complicity in this utterly barbaric ritual is mercilessly outlined, though its cyclical nature is also spotlit: they use as justification to the frantic, screaming Umut that they themselves were married this way. This is how archaic patriarchal customs such as these continue to thrive — with victims becoming perpetrators who would prefer to perpetuate a grotesque, violating practice rather than admit that the lives they have built upon it have been built upon an atrocity. They feel no outrage, but Abdykalykov does, and he translates it here into a clear-eyed, richly shot protest document that is both an absorbing, characterful drama and an unmistakably furious, galvanizing broadside against mass rape masquerading as tradition.

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‘Bride Kidnapping’ Review: A Tough, Handsome, Scathing Indictment of a Barbaric Kyrgyz Custom

Reviewed at Busan Film Festival (Jiseok), Oct.10, 2023. Running time: 80 MIN. (Original title: "Kyz Ala Kachuu")

  • Production: (Kyrgyzstan) An Oy Art production. (World sales: Oy Art, Bishkek.) Producers: Altynai Koichumanova, Aktan Arym Kubat.
  • Crew: Director: Mirlan Abdykalykov. Screenplay: Mirlan Abdykalykov, Marat Alykulov, Tynchtyk Abylkasymov. Camera: Jantai Kyduraliev. Editor: Evgeniy Krokhmalenko.
  • With: Akak Berdibekova, Elchibek Shamenov, Mairambek Erkegulov, Guljamal Mamytbekova, Ainur Akylbek Kyzy. (Kyrgyz dialogue)

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Update: 2024-09-02

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