We Live Here (Atameken), 2025
Feature Documentary, Original Score 1h 20m
Director: Zhanana Kurmasheva
Composer: Akmaral Mergen
Selected festivals: CPH:DOX · Hot Docs · DOK.fest München · APSA
Composer’s Note
The legacy of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site cannot be treated as distant history — it remains a living wound. In a context where public dissent is limited, working on We Live Here became an act of personal and artistic responsibility. The film is built around a persistent, unresolved anxiety about the future, and the music became the space where this invisible pressure could be felt.
Rather than illustrating events, the score is conceived as the audible presence of radiation: unseen, penetrating, and internally sensed. I was searching for a sound language that could carry grief without turning it into commentary. The central element is the qyl-qobyz — stripped of "ethnic colour" and used strictly as a voice of lament (zar). It moves as a fragile, exposed acoustic line through an electronic environment of heavy drones and unstable textures. The electronics do not serve as a genre choice, but as a field that surrounds and infiltrates.
Documentary cinema allows anger, grief, and concern to be expressed not through slogans, but through perception, duration, and silence. This legacy continues into the present, and the score stays in that tense.