VISUAL ARTS

Guerman produced and co-wrote – with wife and regular collaborator Svetlana Karmalita – Ardak Amirkulov’s staggering historical epic about the intrigue and conflict that led to Genghis Khan’s systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar. Spurring an extraordinary wave of great Kazakh films in the 1990s, The Fall of Otrar is at once hallucinatory, visually resplendent and ferociously energetic, packed with eye-catching detail and traversing an endless variety of parched, epic landscapes and ornate palaces. A national epic that is also an art film, the closest antecedent to The Fall of Otrar may be Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, yet it also betrays the influence of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone.