Emir Baigazin

Stunningly shot, slow-burn revenger Harmony Lessons is the formally rigorous and unsettling first feature from Kazakh director Emir Baigazin. The Berlin-awarded film floored audiences with its dreamlike symbolism and window onto complex post-Soviet realities. It sees sensitive young teen Aslan bullied toward breakdown in a small town in the steppes, in which the pecking order descends from organised crime and violence is systematically entrenched. Baigazin is now completing his new project The Wounded Angel, which is also set in small-town Kazakhstan and connects the stories of four 13-year-olds in the early ‘90s during the transition from Soviet rule.