The case of Darezhan Omirbaev reminds us that in cinema, the line between eminence and obscurity can be very fine indeed. Throughout his career, which is now in its fourth decade, the Kazakh filmmaker has received official approbation in the form of awards at Cannes and Locarno, as well as high praise from notable colleagues (Godard, Garrel) and critics (Kent Jones, Alexander Horwath). And yet his work remains all but undistributed, and even the arrival, following an interval of nine years, of not one but two new films—the feature Poet (2021) and the 30-minute Last Screening (2022)—within a space of months, elicited hardly any fanfare until the Viennale celebrated the occasion by dedicating the fourth issue of the lovely polyphonic journal Textur to Omirbaev’s oeuvre.
If can be read as a comment the latest in a series of semi-autobiographical portraits that comprises (1992), (1995), and (2001). The film opens with the image of a postcard taped to a kitchen wall: a picture of a lone man on a waterfront during a storm, grasping a tall thin tree with both hands and fighting to keep it upright against the wind. The camera lingers on this image for a moment before panning over to the table and alighting on Didar’s hands, which are scribbling a poem on a sheet of paper. Recalling iconic images of similar trees in Bergman’s (1960) and Tarkovsky’s (1986), the postcard thus suggests a symbolic equivalence between poetry and cinema, while also offering an illustration of the film’s subject—namely, the struggle of the artist against the forces that sway our world.