The Eurasia International Film Festival does not stand still, developing and gaining new facets every time. Gulnara Abikeeva, Program Director, President of the Association of Film Critics of Kazakhstan, tells about the main feature and the biggest surprise of the current, 16th Eurasia Festival:

– For more than twenty years that have passed since the inception of the film festival in 1998, a whole generation of Kazakhstani cinematographers has been formed, which grew up on the traditions of Eurasia.  Conventionally, they can be called the Generation of “Eurasia”. If in the early 2000s we had a program “Dynamically Developing Kazakh cinema” at the festival, today Kazakh cinema has reached such a level that we have allocated a separate national competition for it. The uniqueness of this competition also lies in the fact that both films that have participated and won at international film festivals and films that have been successful with a wide audience will compete in it. This is practiced at many film festivals – for example, in Thessaloniki, in Greece. The audience is not only watching the international competition, but also waiting for the results of the national one – it kind of doubles the cinematic holiday that any film festival is.