The history of Cinema of Kazakhstan dates back more than eighty years and it is closely related to Almaty. During this time our cinema came a long way having absorbed a rich cultural heritage, which has its roots in the depths of centuries.
For more than a thousand years, Almaty has remained a common ground of different cultures and traditions, a source of inspiration and creativity. We are the successors of the centuries-old Heritage of the Great Steppe, the cradle of great civilizations.
Now, our national Cinema, most of which is produced in Almaty, is experiencing a new birth. Every year dozens of movies of various genres are released.
Almaty Film Festival is aimed at giving this process a meaningful form, creating an international platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences, and promoting new talents.
We hope that Almaty Film Festival will be among the most outstanding international cultural projects and will become a brand within film industry and tourism. It will show the world the unique features and diversity of Almaty, the city of a thousand colors, and it will boost the development of Cinema, the greatest of the arts.
It is especially symbolic that this festival will take place during the International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures declared by the United Nations due to the initiative of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
I am sure that Almaty Film Festival will give a new impetus to cultural dialogue to strengthen peace and preserve human values for current and future generations.
Almaty Film Festival, the best of luck!
Cinema of Kazakhstan is experiencing an unprecedented era of transformation. At this stage of its development, the audience is satisfied with films in terms of their content, meaning and acting, and this is very encouraging. People are starting to recognize what Kazakhstan cinema is. There are more new names that are interesting to our audience and become recognizable outside of Kazakhstan. And this is very important for the development of culture in Kazakhstan.
Now we want to bring our national cinema to the world level and we believe that Almaty Film Festival will reveal the potential of our city. Therefore, the main competition of our film festival is aimed at promoting cooperation between the film industries of different countries, which will be able to discover new opportunities for film production, including co-production. This will expand the scope of future film projects, and for this reason we called the main competition "Rapprochement of Cultures". For this competition, we will select only those films that were shot in co-production.
Thus, by inviting one film, we are engaging several countries in cooperation. We hope that Almaty Film Festival will become another trademark of Almaty.
