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Miguel Angel Jiménez • Director

Chaika: a Kazakhstan love story

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- Spanish director Miguel Angel Jiménez presented his second feature Chaika at the 11th Brussels Film Festival

After Ori in 2009, Spanish director Miguel Angel Jiménez is back with another film shot in Georgia. His second feature, Chaika [+see also:
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, tells the love story between a prostitute and a sailor who meet in a cargo ship before continuing their way home together throughout the winter in Siberia and the summer in Kazakhstan. After a limited theatrical release in Spain at the end of May, Chaika is now being shown at the Panorama section of the 11th Brussels Film Festival.

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Cineuropa: What was the motivation behind the making of Chaika?
Miguel Angel Jiménez: Scriptwriter Luis Moya and I saw an incredible photo by Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen, showing pieces of rockets in the middle of the steppes in Kazakstan and children playing with them. That photo got stuck in our minds and we decided to go there, to get to know the country, the people and basically get inspired to make a film. We spent about a month there, travelling and taking notes.

At same time, because I had worked on a programme for Spanish television in which I got to know some stories of real-life prostitutes, when we boarded on that trip, I already had on the back of my mind that I could possibly use some of that material to tell the story of a prostitute in Kazakstan. We did not really transfer the life of the prostitute that I knew to the reality of Kazakhstan, but the experiences of our lead character Aysha were certainly influenced by the rhythm that I had heard – constantly trying to be free, jumping from one men to another, always escaping, looking for a better horizon.

She certainly seems restless, whereas the sailor character seems to be much more stable…
To me, he is a guy who has finally found love and he is willing to settle. His relatives in the film were inspired by a family we met there. They lived in an isolated farm and we got to imagine how their life would be in such a place during winter.

Why did you start Chaika with archive images from a speech by Valentina Tereshkova?
I wanted to compare the past and the present; to show the contrast between her feminist/propaganda speech when Kazakhstan was still part of the Soviet Union– “in the future women will be free to do anything” – and what happens nowadays, particularly in the periphery of Kazakhstan, where women are still not really free.

Why have you shot most of the film in Georgia, although it is supposed to be set in Kazakhstan?
The film is a co-production between Spain, Georgia and Russia. We wrote the script and we did our best to have a co-production agreement with the biggest company in Kazakhstan, but they were uncomfortable with the fact that the lead character was a muslin prostitute, so we decided to set up a co-production with Georgia, where I had already shot my first feature, Ori. We found amazing locations and cast Russian-speaking actors from Georgia.

We eventually returned to Kazakhstan, with a fake script and a fake title (New Horizons) and we could actually shoot the last part of the film there, in the desert.

What were the most challenging moments of the shoot?
In Georgia, no doubt – the atmospheric conditions. We shot in a very isolated farm in Little Siberia, between Armenia and Turkey. Getting there every day on military trucks, working in sub-zero temperatures, it wasn’t that easy.
In Kazakhstan, we had trouble with the police, because we were shooting without permission. I supposed that if we had a co-production agreement with a local company, things would have been different. It was hard experience, but now, looking back, I think those were the happiest days of my life – I was surrounded by friends, making the best film I could.

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