Zhoqtau: Chronicle of the Dead Sea (1989)
Zhoqtau — the Kazakh ritual lament for the dead — is what Sergei Azimov titled his 1989 Aral film, framing the catastrophe not as documentary chronicle but as national funeral. The film opens at a graveside on the Aral shore where the grave fills with water as it is dug, women's voices carrying the zhoqtau over the dry seabed. From there to the villa of Kallibek Kamalov, "the great son of the Karakalpak people," whose daughter married Sharaf Rashidov's son while the sea died beside them. To clinics: esophageal cancer at seven times the national rate, the country's highest infant mortality. Its keyhole is a Kazakh mother who buried five children. It closes on the besik, the wooden cradle — priceless at the bazaar, now standing over children's graves where it had never stood in Karakalpak literature before.
Credits: Zhoqtau: Khronika mertvogo moria (Жоқтау. Өлі теңіз хроникасы / Lament: Chronicle of the Dead Sea). Kazakhfilm Studio, Alma-Ata, 1989. 68 min. Directed by Sergei Azimov; scenario by Sergei Azimov and Yurii Reznikov; cinematography by B. Әlimbaev.