The Fall of Otrar

Aleksei German produced and co-wrote (with wife and regular collaborator Svetlana Karmalita) Ardak Amirkulov’s staggering historical epic about the intrigue and turmoil preceding Genghis Khan’s systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar. The movie that spurred the extraordinary wave of great Kazakh films in the 90s, The Fall of Otrar is at once hallucinatory, visually resplendent and ferociously energetic, packed with eye-catching (and gouging) detail and traversing an endless variety of parched, epic landscapes and ornate palaces.