Longer Than a Day

An impressively picturesque drama about a French photographer’s intrusion into the life of a Kazakh woman.

2024, Malika Mukhamejan

Kazakhstan–Russia–Italy
122 minutes, Kazakh with Russian subtitles

Starring: Zukhara Sanzysbay, Elzhas Rahim, Vladimir Consigny, Erzhan Nurymbet

Karlygash takes care of the cattle and horses, cleans the yard and the house, cooks for her husband and family—in short, she does everything that is expected of a woman in a Kazakh village. However, she is still regarded as an outsider, even by her own husband, who continues to hope for a reunion with his first love. Karlygash is left to search for mute answers to her longing in the vast sky above the steppe—but suddenly a French photographer, Louis, appears in this landscape. His old car needs repairs, and the guest is forced to stay in the village for a while.

Shot from Longer Than a Day, 2024

For major festivals this is an excellent film—sensuous, visually exquisite (apples, horses, a clear river), and also about the “liberated woman of the East.”

—Vasily Stepanov, Seance Magazine

In her first feature film, Malika Mukhamedzhan could well have limited herself to the story of a strange love triangle (or square, if we include the ex-girlfriend of Karlygash’s husband). The director has a subtle understanding of melodrama, and is sufficiently attentive to the actors’ faces and movements to prevent this melodrama from drifting into sentimentality. But Longer Than a Day is much more ambitious: this tale of alienation in a majestic, indifferent landscape does not fit into any genre boundaries, surprising viewers time after time with an unexpected angle, a mise-en-scene worthy of a classical painting, and a noble and mysterious intonation that bring to mind the works of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Carlos Reygadas.