Dvortsevoy’s first film is a portrait of a nomad shepard and his family camped in the Southern mountains of Kazakhstan. Unforgettable images—of a toddler fighting sleep to eat his bowl of sour cream, a camel undergoing nose piercing by pocket knife—combine in a mesmerizing documentation of life lived in a
forbidding landscape.
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
liked it.
Ethnically Russian, Kazakhstan-born filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy lived for three-and-a-half months with the nomad family featured in Paradise. His familiarity with the subject, combined with his observational style -- there are only 27 shots in the entire film -- blurs the line between documentary and fiction filmmaking. While each scene rings with a subtle understanding of the texture of these herdsmen's lives, the shots are too carefully constructed to be a Fredrick Wiseman-style documentary. Beautiful, exotic, and captivating, Paradise is a fascinating work for the cinematically adventurous. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide