Little Men

Little Men is about two sympathetic losers with good looks, about groovy tunes and dry slapstick humour. This subtle comedy by a young director about the post Soviet generation in Kazakhstan will warm many a festival heart. The film has the characteristic calm tempo of the 1990s Kazakhstani cinema of Omirbaev, Aprymov or Karakulov. There are not many dialogues in Little Men. Most eloquent are the minor visual details that reveal such a lot about the hidden feelings of the two boys and about everyday life in the most important city in Kazakhstan, where economic perspectives for the small man are not very rosy. The friends Bek and Max share an apartment in Almaty. They earn their living -however little that may be -by selling trinkets on the street. Max, a womaniser with a smooth tongue, would most like to emigrate to Germany where his grandmother lives. Bek, the shy romantic, dreams of True Love. Max has a different philosophy about love: He thinks the world is teeming with unhappy women. He gains a cynical pleasure from conquering as many members of the unhappy gender as he can, which only serves to strengthen Bek in his romantic convictions. Everything seems to run to plan until Bek falls hopelessly in love with a woman in red. The course on `women’ that Max gives him whether he likes it or not would appear to be bearing fruit…