Qaş (2022)
Feature film, original score. 1h 53m
Composer: Akmaral Mergen
Director: Aisultan Seit
Awards for the score
Best Music, Critics' Choice Awards Kazakhstan, 2023 — winner
Best Original Music, 17th Asian Film Awards, 2024 — nomination
Best Original Score, Golden Panda Awards, 2024 — nomination
Best Composer, Tulpar National Film Award, 2024 — nomination
Film: Watch on Amazon · OST: Listen on Spotify · Info: More on IMDb
Synopsis Set against the harrowing backdrop of the 1930s Kazakh famine, Qaş follows a local gravedigger forced to leave his ruined village in search of salvation for his younger brother. His desperate trek across the vast, unforgiving steppe becomes a profound test of survival, humanity, and psychological endurance amidst a collective tragedy.
Artistic approach
Context
Qaş is an independent, author-driven feature that addresses a historically traumatic subject still difficult to articulate in contemporary Kazakhstan. In today's geopolitical climate, speaking about such experiences directly carries ethical weight. The film therefore adopts a chamber form, choosing restraint and internal, lived experience over spectacle or historical exposition. Rather than reconstructing history or tradition, it approaches cultural memory through perception and affect, opening a careful dialogue across generations.
Process
The score took about eight months to complete. I dedicated the initial phase to searching for sound and shaping the film's sonic palette: recording instruments, exploring playing approaches, processing textures and defining clear sonic boundaries before final composition. One key music-driven sequence, written before shooting, established the film's sonic framework from the beginning.
Material
Working with a limited set of Kazakh traditional instruments, I treated them not as quotation or "ethnic" colour, but as raw material. Taking them outside their conventional roles allowed me to articulate bodily states such as hunger, nausea, disorientation and physical fear. I performed all the parts myself: the sound I was searching for did not exist within established practice and required a direct, experimental engagement with the instruments.
Tonality
Tonally, the score operates within a flexible harmonic field. A pitch area around C, often perceived as C minor, serves as an underlying anchor linked to the steppe as it appears in the film: vast, grey, and unstable. In liminal moments this grounding loosens, harmonic reference fades, and atonal textures emerge. These shifts extend the film's experimental approach beyond instrumentation into tonal, rhythmic and formal organisation, choices that carry weight when working with Kazakh traditional instruments.
Reception
In Kazakhstan, the film's genre position was not easy to define for audiences and distributors. It was sometimes described as "ethno-horror", although the artistic intent was a chamber drama. Yet, for me as a composer and performer, the sonic "horror" was very real: pushing Kazakh traditional instruments so far beyond their culturally permitted boundaries was a deeply transgressive and unsettling experience. Despite the cultural sensitivity of this approach, the film remained publicly present as an experimental work and was not pushed into a safer, more conventional form.
Contextual research: Cultural analysis of Qaş by Zira Nauryzbay