Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

KissEnglishPasto ...........................................................from Pasto,Colombia...Via: L.A. CA., CALI, COLOMBIA....and ORLANDO, FL *** This review may contain spoilers ***If you don't know what TULPAN means in English, you will after watching the film. And yet, they never translate it for you...You have to figure it out for yourself! Sometimes, unfortunately, it seems that particular talent is fast becoming a lost art among U.S. movie-goers. Take a film like TULPAN, which is so simple, so unpretentious, and yet, manages to show us things in life that are so delicate and complicated! ***May Contain a Minor Spoiler or Two!*** What motivated me to give TULPAN a look? Certainly not the IMDb Blurb, it really misses the mark! No, my decision was based on a truly accurate, quality review. Originality is something to be prized and praised in a movie. You know how rare it is to encounter a film with something totally original to offer. TULPAN has at least 5 elements that I don't recall seeing in any other cinematic work! Without them, 6 or 7* more than likely would have been my rating...But I'll add 1/2* for each original element, bringing my rating up to 9*. So, What are these elements? 1) ALL the actors in TULPAN appear using their REAL names! Maybe you're thinking you've seen a few other films like that. Well, in ALL the others I remember like this, the production values are horrific and the acting worse. Here the acting is so natural, so oblivious to the camera, it lends a "Slice of life" feel to the production.2) Have seen movies in dozens of different languages! Kazak is not one of them. So, TULPAN is my first in this language related to Turkish.3)Have you ever seen mouth-to-mouth respiration administered to a newborn calf in a movie? Not just once, but several times by two different actors! Elements 4) and 5)....? Let's keep the last two elements a surprise. (Although my alternate title above should give you a hint.) Sheep-herding on the Asian Steppe is anything but exciting. TULPAN REALLY drives that point home. If you're not willing to sit through movies where the pacing is, at times, excruciatingly deliberate, but that reward you in the end for your patience...This is not for you. If you like windows into new and exotic cultures, check TULPAN out! 9* STARS*.....ENJOY/DISFRUTELA! Any comments, questions or observations, in English or Español, are most welcome!

Philby-3 Kazakhstan is one of those dusty Central Asian countries left over from the break-up of the Soviet Empire and probably best known in the West as the putative birthplace of Sasha Baron Cohen's media clown Borat. In this film the documentary filmmaker Sergei Dvortsevoy goes some distance toward giving us westerners a taste of real life amongst shepherds on the steppe. Fresh out of the Russian navy submarine service, Asi goes to stay with his sister Samal and her sheep herdsman husband Ondas. Despite the isolation, wind, dust and extreme temperatures, Asi dreams of having his own flock and settling down. But Ondas refuses to help him with the flock until he finds a wife, for a single man cannot be a herdsman. The film opens with Ondas negotiating to marry Asi off to Tulpan, the daughter of a neighbour, but Tulpan, who remains behind a curtain and is never actually seen, rejects him – "His ears are too big". Asi tries again, alas to no avail.This plot is really secondary to an account of what it is like to live and work in a place like this. Ondas's lambs keep dying and the vet is called (how is a mystery). He diagnoses lack of feed, so the family must pack up its Yurt and move elsewhere. Much comedy is provided by a young injured camel being transported in the vet's sidecar, followed by the camel's mother which bites anyone who gets too close. Ondas and Samal's three children also provide plenty of entertainment. The oldest girl sings a mournful folksong all the time, the older boy recites entire news bulletins learned from the portable radio he keeps with him, and the younger boy is just plain cute. Asi's tractor driver friend, with his collection of pin-ups in his cab, also provides some amusement.Life on the steppe is tough, but brings with it a certain amount of freedom. Modernity, in the form of the official news bulletins, parodies of the official style, is at a good distance away. The sheep flocks are big enough to provide a living as long as there is a demand for their wool. Ondas, a proud tough man, would not be happy living in a town. Samal might, though. Dvortsevoy does not idealise his characters and they are all the more appealing. However, I can't see the steppes becoming a tourist destination except for some very hardy travellers.

mmunier For our group it was our 3rd visit to this "area", and out of the four of us, three found it was one too many. A few years back we started with "The Weeping Camel", having reasonably enjoyed it later on we also saw "The cave of the yellow dog" (I hope I got those titles right!) Then "Tulpan" came with such raving reviews that we had to see it too. Well we did and it was a little like a sentence. I couldn't say it was like watching grass growing for the obvious reason (no this is not a spoiler!) Usually though I enjoy revisiting places I "have been" before but somehow it did not work anymore for me this time.... and now this is THE SPOILER: it was not much different than the two previously mentioned stories. That's it - how long can you watch people living in a confine area where very little happens. Yes the panorama has something, yes it's poetic but no it's not for me anymore.When I read some of the reviews here or elsewhere I think of a funny event that happened at a local market where a man was demonstrating a gadget to get your car running at a high performance with little fuel. It was amazing and very convincing with a huge running engine being part of the demonstration. I did buy two of these gadgets! As I continued to wander about the market I bumped in something even more amazing...The same person was now demonstrating potato peelers and with the same verbal "dexterity"!Now, this could be another spoiler... There was a certain goat that made me ponder whether it could have had some very symbolic representations and made me feel that perhaps we, as an audience, were the subject of some of these representation. Perhaps it's safer to go and see some movies without reading too much about or keep a check on expectation. Perhaps it could be wise to check one's mood as well on the day if you have reason to believe that it could affect your perception. But first timers you should enjoy it because it still is special mm

Chris Knipp Another film from Kazakhstan, but unlike the NYFF's 'Chouga,' far from being set in the newly rich urban part of the country. Dvortsevoy, a successful documentary filmmaker, chose to make this, his first feature, in the ethnographic mode, among shepherds in the Betpak Dala, the steppe, a region of scrubby grass, dirt, flatland, whirling wind storms and stormy skies. The technique is to work in near-wilderness, among non-actors, with nothing but camels or donkeys or rugged trucks to travel by, surrounded by a herd of sheep and a few goats, living in a yurt. The method and setting resemble those of Dava and Falorni's 'The Weeping Camel,' but the focus this time is not as anecdotal and the story raises fewer troubling questions. It's still not certain that the effect of "authenticity" means the events we're witnessing truthfully depict life in the steppe. But the sense of trying to adapt to a harsh environment and culture is powerful and the landscape is awesome, and the sheep births we witness are unquestionably real.The protagonist is Asa (Askat Kuchinchirekov). He is a young sailor who's just finished his military service who comes out to the "Hunger Steppe" to live with the family of his sister Samal (Samal Eslyamova), headed by her husband, an older man, Ondas (Ondasyn Besikasov). Sailors draw their dreams under the lapels of their uniforms and Asa's sketch shows the plain with a yurt, children, camels, and the sun shining. Apparently he is from somewhere else (it's not clear how his sister got to be Ondas' wife) but he doesn't want city life, he wants to make his paradise out here. He dreams of prospering as a shepherd, doing so well he can buy solar panels to put on his yurt so he can have electricity. His pal is the nutty Boni (Tulepbergen Baisakalov), a transport driver whose truck is plastered with magazine photos of nude babes and who plays loud pop music as he drives madly across the plain. It's Boni who first brings Asa to the yurt of Ondas and who dreams and schemes with him.Driven by Boni, Ondas takes Asa more than once a day's ride to a family who have an eligible daughter, the beautiful Tulpan (Tulip), whom the suitor only glimpses. She watches behind a screen. At these interviews Asa has an unfortunate tendency to dwell on a story about how he successfully fought an octopus. It doesn't seem to go over with Tulpan's aged dad (Amangeldi Nurzhanbayev ) or her mother (Tazhyban Kalykulova), who apparently has listened with a sympathetic ear to her desire to go off to college. Tulpan says she doesn't care for Asa, anyway, says his ears are too big. End of story. Ondas says that if Asa gets a wife, he can have a flock of his own, and only then. But there are no other women around. Tulpan becomes little more than Asa's dream, like the idyllic yurt and flock and prosperity and happy life. What can Asa do? Well, he can find a lost pregnant sheep and assist in its giving birth to a healthy lamb. But he still is very ambivalent about whether he wants to stay and face Ondas' disapproval or strike out for Sakhalin island as Boni wants or go to the capital, Astana, where there are probably jobs--and eligible women. But what stands out in 'Tulpan' is Asa's dream--the little picture under the collar of his sailor jacket that seems to draw him back every time he packs up his little valise and starts to go away.Dvortsevoy populates his landscape and the yurt with noisy characters to break the sounds of silence and the roaring winds. Samal and her daughter Nika love to sing at the top of their lungs, with sometimes pleasing, sometimes grating effect. Beke is a little boy with a great memory who listens to the radio broadcasts in Russian and can recite the national and global and cultural news verbatim on Ondas' command. Ondas himself is often barking out harsh commands. There is the smallest boy, who runs around chirping and laughing all the time riding a wooden stick, an indomitable spirit and perhaps potentially as nutty as Boni. The omnipresent sheep of Ondas' flock seem to be too often growing weak and dying. A vet (Esentai Tulendiev) has to come in with Ondas' boss to assess the cause: he decrees that the animals are not sick (or poisoned by chemical waste like the ones in the Naples region), buy just hungry. The yurt has to be moved to better grazing land.This is an Arte co-production. It's not a great film by any means; it's technical aspects are minimal. But some will be impressed by its vividness. Asa is a winsome character and there are moments when the wind and the sky create a wild poetry. The sheep, in all their noise and disorder, fill the screen powerfully too. This may have been designed to be seen on television but it is powerful on a big screen.The film won the Un Certain Regard Prize--Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema, 2008, and is part of the NYFF.