I loved this movie from the minute I saw the scene where a bull drops out of a local delivery plane & plummets to earth killing two main characters. YUP the bull did the job and then swam to shore unharmed! But I am too far ahead of myself... This movie has a wonderfully painterly quality that is brought about by the surrealistic cinematic effects that the director, Bakhtiar Khudojnazarov brings with his use of bright colours and washes of Technicolor. The female lead, Chulpan Khamatova, is perfect as the seventeen years old aspiring actress who loves Shakespeare and wants to become a film star. She lives in a small village in Uzbekistan with her mentally damaged brother and her loving father. The girl meets an entrepreneur ( plane pilot) and has sex with him after he makes her believe that he is a friend of Tom Cruise. The next thing she knows, she is pregnant, desperate and on a quest to restore the family honor by finding the cowardly jerk who seduced her. Father, and daughter (Mamlakat) supported by the decidedly "different" brother (wonderfully played by Moritz Bleibtrau--Manny in 'Run Lola Run') begin a wildly fantastic trip through the landscapes of Uzbekistan in which tradition and superstition clash with the chaos of a materialistic world. The wonderful script makes the film's sometimes slapstick and giddy narrative into something grander -- a meditation on maternity as a form of inspired madness.One scene is great genius... The local delivery plane with a bull and a cow in the holding bay swoops sideways to get a closer look at Mamlakat's wedding taking place on a barge in the middle of the the lake, and just as the plane swoops, the bull falls out of the side door of the plane & plummets down to land SPLAT on the bride's new husband-to-be & her father- killing them both dead- and leaving her pregnant and a sinner. Chulpan Khamatova is perfect as Mamlakat, the perplexed mother to be, confronting miracles, wonders, joy, death and the unexpected as she searches for her child's father. Try & find this DVD or haunt the late night channels like I do.

This is a really sweet story about the East. A young girl becomes pregnant, and her father and brother want to find the papa.Of course, it's not an easy thing, so we can follow them on their long and funny trip.It's really serious at the start, and it becomes more and more absurd. At the end, when you think it's over, it takes a round, and goes on.With beautiful scenes, and with a Kusturica-styled humor.

Do not waste your time and money for this movie.What is praised as an intelligent comedy is nothing than a chain of absurdities. Most are so silly that an intelligent person cannot laugh about them. The style reminds of "Agua para chocolate" but in that movie the absurdities and the phantasy elements are presented with humor.The director obviously wanted to create something similar to "The Tin Drum" (the voice of the unborn child, the fishes appearing again and again) but he evidently failed to do so.Some nice pictures of the Central Asian landscape do not compensate for the movie's flaws. (3/10)

This movie reminds strongly of some movies of the director Emir Kusturica. It takes places in an ex-soviet republic in Central Asia. It shows to which extent it became chaotic there after the fall of the soviet union. It is full of contradictories and bizarre happenings. A family is looking for a wandering actor who made its daughter pregnant. During this search many crazy things occur and the end is even crazier. Nevertheless it is very interesting. Sometimes it is very funny and some other times it is sad. It shows also the conditions in which people in this zone of the world are living. It reminds strongly of the movies of Emir Kusturica about Yugoslavia or it's former republics.