This is one of those independent movies that will never reach the great audience, one of those movies you have to look for. It's a pity, because it is a noteworthy piece of cinema, firstly because it is focused on a reality, on a country we don't know much about, and I discovered a wonderful landscape and a culture I had never seen or heard about. Secondly, because the clash of cultures represented by the Parisian free-thinking girl and the Kyrgyz people can be transposed, on a different level, also to western society, where deep contrasts between people belonging to different cultures and religions often cause deep problems of co-habitation and reciprocal respect. The message is comforting, supporting the idea that respect for tradition should go hand in hand with reason and common sense, and not turn into passatism. The young are those who have the task and often the burden to find a possible, however difficult, balance between past culture and modern world. Tradition is a precious heritage to be protected and respected, but not an untouchable and fossilized set of out of time rites and everyone has the right or the duty to question and to revise them according to modern sensibility, which has also a value of its own. This is an issue that concerns every culture, every religion, especially in today's multi-ethnic ad multicultural societies. The movie, despite the slow pace at some moments, offers also funny moments, the two main characters are well paired and prove good performances, especially Isabelle, who is portrayed, at the beginning, as too ingenuously gullible, but undergoes a positive and credible evolution as she gets more in contact with the real nature of the local people. But what really impresses the viewer is the sublime landscape, rendered through long and vivid shooting, which makes those images stick in our memory.
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