The 25th anniversary New York Asian Film Festival took place from July 10th to July 26th. For details on what you missed, click here.
To start, a little, arguably unnecessary peek behind the curtains: this year I found myself disappointed in my lack of full international outreach. The majority of the films I covered this year came from either Japan, Hong Kong, or China. And while yes, the extremely robust film industries of those areas mean they often take up the bulk of the programming… that I didn’t manage to review a single Korean film this year feels like a pretty big blotch on my mission to try and bring you the best cinema that every corner of Asia has to offer.
So with that in mind, it is perhaps appropriate that the last movie I managed to see as part of my NYAFF experience for 2026 was from none other than Kazakhstan.
All the better that it freakin’ rules.
The story of Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Turgaud is not so much generic as it is universal, but however you slice it, it’s almost certainly something you’ve seen before in one form or another: an enigmatic man (in this case Berik Aytzhanov’s Beka) takes on a job as bodyguard for a cruel and remorseless figure of power (Dias Baytunov as the repellant, sluglike dictator Baylat) who is, understandably, a prime target for assassination. He claims to have no conscience and no drive other than the successful completion of his job… but how much standing by can he actually do? Is his conscience truly dead, or merely dormant?
In the shadow of a three act structure, it is only a matter of time before we find out one way or the other.
the term Turgaud, I am given to understand, derives from the time of Genghis Khan and refers to a warrior-bodyguard whose oath of loyalty takes precedence above all else in life. And we are all, by now, painfully aware of the masculine obsession with these sort of badass values: loyalty, honor, commitment. They are taken as goods in and of themselves. But they are, in fact, neutral at best. And the question the Turgaud (the film) asks (and answers, in no uncertain terms) is what the actual worth is of these so-called virtues when spent in the service of the undeserving.
Beka as a character represents these values to a tee, and in the mere surface outlining, further represents a much beloved archetype: the stoic badass, haunted by his past but savvy and exceedingly competent. Cynical. Drinks too much. But eminently not to be fucked with.
You know the type.
If Beka cuts roughly the figure we expect in our initial encounters with him, there are still signs from the beginning that we’re hardly dealing with the second coming of The Man With No Name here. Firstly, his alcoholism seems less like afectation and more like genuine alcoholism. Second, his casual cruelty to a hotel clerk that he forces to dance at gunpoint is hardly the sort of thing we’d expect from even the most anti- of antoheroes. And despite his admonishment of his weak-willed brother for bringing his family into the orbit of a tyrant like Beylat, he notably does little to protect them or extract any of them now that they’re there.
As potential redemption arcs go, his starts off with a steeper path than most.
Still, even as the bum he resemebles at the outset it couldn’t be more clear that he remains miles ahead of anyone else in his coterie. At bare minimum, he’s the only competent amongst a platoon of buffoons. Hell, as cruel and as dangerous as he may be, Baylat cuts a faintly ridiculous character, a politico who spends all his time dressed as a refugee from a Mad Max film (notably, the pro-Baylat rallies we see from time to time all have people carrying signs of him as a conventional suit-and-tie candidate). He has a gross habit of sticking his tongue out euphorically whenever violence is committed in his name, and generally seems more reptillian than human. He is a self-made cartoon villain, and as such, surrounds himself with other cartoons.
Beka’s trauma no longer allows him to believe in humanity but he’s no cartoon, and that’s where things get interesting.
His unflashy, no-nonsense approach to aset protection leads to a sequence where he is forced to establish dominance by way of a fight scene with his co-workers that plays out less as badassery and more as a one-sided slapstick pummeling. And while the movie was amusing and engaging before that point, this is where the vibe of the thing really began to speak to me.
As I said before, the setup for the movie could have gone in any of a dozen directions, tonally speaking. Indeed, the Kazakh filmmaker who did the introduction to the screening (notably not the actual director of the film) made a comparison to the Coen Brothers. But what I did not expect, and was therefore deeply gratified to experience, was that the film might exist at the perfect Venn diagram between the rueful existential absurdism of Aki Kaurismaki and the mordant deadpan violence of Beat Takeshi.
To be clear, the movie is operating on its own wavelength: the only other Kazakh movie I’ve seen (Sweetie You Won’t Believe It, part of the 20XX festival) while being a much broader vehicle, trafficked in similarly [SOMETHING] tones. So obviously this is just kind of how they roll over there. But seeing this sort of thing executed in this sort of fashion is, shall we say, relevant to my interests specifically.
Dominance established thusly without breaking a sweat, Beka then faces his first actual challenge in an expertly staged (both in the context of the film and in the behind-the-camera sense) ambush. Blocked in a tunnel and surounded by heavily armed assailants, it’s the sort of seemingly inescapable trap that would test the mettle of any so-called warrior. ..and it is no surprise that out of everyone, only Beka manages to come out looking good.
To see the feared and hated Baylat reduced to a whimpering mess within the first fifteen minutes of meeting him is just as indicative of Yerzhanov’s agenda as the tense and violent standoff itself… and an indicator that as expert as the filmmaker is at delivering the action movie goods, nothing he does will be in service of glamorizing what he clearly sees as a hellish world of actions and consequences, and spares zero pity for those who choose to participate in it.
And so there is an unspoken aspect here that’s not exactly hard to miss, but is decidedly easy to ignore if you’re watching this movie through the eyes of someone expecting a conventional narrative turn, which is this: if not for the coolheaded conmpetence of Beka, every last one of these people would have been killed within minutes of setting out. And, as has been made more than clear at this point, have almost certainly earned this fate many times over. So when we watch the film, witness Baylat order atrocity after atrocity and wait for Beka to finally take a stand, the unasked question arises:
Why the hell are we supposed to be rooting for this guy to find his soul in the first place?
And the answer comes back: we aren’t. Not really.
But in our hopes that Beka will finally fulfill the typical arc of these things and switch to the side of righteousness, we assume him to be the hero when instead, he is merely the protagonist, and the actual hero of the piece has been staring us in the face all along.
The mysterious Fox, who we have viewed as a rival or a femme fatale not to be trusted, is actually the beating heart of the film. A survivor of men like Baylat and a witness to atrocities not unlike Beka, but who regardless remains the only character who retains hope for a potential better future. It is she who gets the last word, and rightly so.
She even has a son who follows her everywhere and plays his own part in the delivery of justice. It’s been Lone Wolf and Cub this entire time and we never even noticed!
Turgaud is exactly the kind of movie I love to discover and share with the world, which makes it a perfect note to end this 25th aniversary festival experience for me. I never quite know what I’m going to get, even when I think I know what to expect, and that’s what keeps me coming back.
Happy Anniversary, NYAFF, and here’s to many more!
