To enter the Eurasia Film Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan, film goers must make the long walk through the Esentai mall, central Asia’s biggest luxury shopping complex, all the while being serenaded by lute-strumming men in fur-trimmed national costume.

The backdrop of luxury brand logos raises no eyebrows here: in this country flush with oil money, conspicuous consumption is entrenched in the landscape, only the latest currency devaluation leaving the mall a little emptier than usual.

The elaborate welcome for the smattering of local and international guests also includes an installation of footage from The Road to Mother, an historical and patriotic epic depicting the Kazakh people’s fortitude in the face of Stalin-era collectivisation, released by the state-owned studio Kazakhfilm.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s youngest daughter, Aliya, is credited as “general producer” on the film, a hint at the tight grasp the president and his family have over the country’s film and media.

Inside the grand opening, local stars in shimmering gowns congregated alongside the socialite offspring of the region’s oil oligarchs to watch the festival’s opening film, a new crime thriller called Hackers, directed by Akan Satayev – the same man behind Kazakhstan’s biggest domestic box office success Myn Bala, a blockbuster-style epic about an 18th-century horseman battling tribal invaders.

The Eurasia Film Festival, now in its 11th edition, usually focuses on new films from Asia and Europe but this year merged with the Shaken’s Constellation Film Festival, which screens work from the central Asian states.

The festival centred around the main Silk Road competition for feature-length films, which included a screening of Kazakhstan’s 2015 Oscar entry, Stranger, which is director Yermek Tursunov’s third film to be selected for the Academy Awards race, and Mustang, Deniz Gamze Erguven’s acclaimed debut about five sisters in a conservative Turkish village forced to repress their sexuality.

Censorship

While socially critical films often face a tough battle to get funding or to be distributed in Kazakhstan, they are not repressed totally.

A drunk driver who kills a pedestrian and uses his connections to dodge responsibility is the premise of Case N6, Witness, presented in the festival’s new Kazakh projects showcase. The feature is a project by one of the members of the self-proclaimed “Partisan” film-makers, who have resorted to a micro-budget approach to allow them creative freedom.

In a heated film-maker panel on alternative financing methods during the festival, director Adilkhan Yerzhanov decried censorship and a prevalent culture of escapist cinema. “If you try to play by the rules of commercial distribution it means dealing with the ministry of culture and re-editing the movie you want to make,” he said.

Asked by another panelist who the Partisan films are fighting against, Yerzhanov replied: “Dishonesty in film-making.”

Fellow Partisan film-maker Serik Abishev said private investors are reluctant to be associated with socially critical films: “People here are scared of the government. And all money in the country is connected with the government. But the situation luckily is different from the one in Uzbekistan.

“We wanted to shoot a movie with Uzbek construction workers. Firstly they agreed, but when they found out what it was about they got scared and refused because they were afraid the president of their country would have their families killed,” Abishev said.

“They weren’t joking. Then we realised the level of pressure there. There’s no way a Partisan movie could exist in Uzbekistan. Here, we’re not afraid for our lives but it’s absurd that people we want funding from are so scared of losing their jobs.”

Al Pacino as Pope

This year, the ministry of culture appointed Rashid Nugmanov as the festival’s head, a surprising choice given the director’s past criticism of Nazarbayev’s regime.

A director himself, Almaty-born Nugmanov gained cult status in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s on the back of Perestroika’s new cultural and political openness for The Needle, one of the first films portraying drug addiction in the region, which starred Leningrad rock icon Viktor Tsoi, helping to initiative what is now called the Kazakh New Wave.

“It’s a little bit surprising,” Nugmanov said of his appointment, “but at the same time this is a very special country. It’s not like Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, where if you say something against the system, you’re done forever.”

After a long break from directing since moving to Paris in 1993, Nugmanov is developing a film in Kazakhstan about Genghis Khan’s grandson, Batu, which he hopes will attract the notoriously hard-to-crack Chinese co-production market just across the border.

“It’s [going to be] like The Godfather set in the 13th century. To make it even closer to the crime genre, I would probably cast Al Pacino as the Pope.” Now who can argue with that?