Life amidst Kazakhstan's inhospitable Hunger Steppe. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

LITTLE-BY-LITTLE the simple charms of Tulpan spring up and overwhelm you. Gently comic and endearing, the debut feature-film from Kazakhstani director Sergey Dvortsevoy says more about family dynamics than the bloated vanity of Frenchman Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale.

The film’s disarmingly sparing premise sees Asa returning from service with the Russian navy to live with his sister, brother-in-law and their children on Kazakhstan’s desolately bleak steppe. His sister’s family are nomadic shepherds; in order to be secure his own flock he must first marry. The problem is there’s only one single girl left in the immediate area (which means she’s a days drive away). Tulpan’s opening sequence sees Asa propositioning an elderly couple for permission to wed their daughter. He regales them with tales of a combative octopus and offers ten sheep and a chandelier. They decline. Their daughter, whose name is Tulpan, would rather live in the city.

We never see Tulpan. She remains an enigma and emblematic of a cultural clash: rural and urban, traditional mores and a globalised future. These themes occur throughout the film as Dvortsevoy utilises his documentary-background to reveal keenly detailed observations of Kazakhstan. Asa hums along to ‘Rivers of Babylon’. A vet rides in on motorbike carrying a camel in its sidecar. A young boy listens to radio reports about an earthquake in Japan. “Seven on the Richter scale!” he announces with excitement.

Shot mostly on handheld camera in an ethnographic documentary style, the film’s vision of the Hunger Steppe is breathtaking, with the vast and windswept landscape forming a character in its own right. From the dust and tussock Dvortsevoy sketches an intimate portrait of a family battling their environment and each other, yet drawn together. The director’s use of amateur actors is a masterstroke. He coaxes forth unforced and utterly believable performances. In particular Samal Esljamova as Asa’s sister is mesmerising. The scene in which she sings to her husband and children, huddled together in their yurt, lingers with you long after you leave the cinema.

You can’t help but empathise with Askhat Kuchincherekov as Asa, the hopeless romantic who must reconcile his dreams with reality. His epiphany-type moment, in which he finds himself unexpected midwife to a stricken sheep, is a remarkably memorable piece of cinema.

Those scarred by the ‘gentle’ rhythms of The Story of the Weeping Camel take heart. Tulpan (winner of Un Certain Regard honours at last year’s Cannes) constantly subverts your expectations to create something inexplicably wondrous.