Kazakhstan’s Daneliya Tuleshova took sixth place at the Junior Eurovision song contest hosted by Minsk, Belarus. It was Kazakhstan’s debut at the contest, which gathered junior vocalists aged nine to 14 years from 18 countries, the others being Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, France, Georgia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia and the Netherlands. Roksana Węgiel from Poland earned 215 points to win. Tuleshova performed the song “Ozine Sen” (“Believe in Yourself”). Born in Almaty in 2006, Tuleshova gained popularity after winning the “The Voice Kids” talent show in Ukraine in 2017, the year after she earned the People’s Favourite national award in Kazakhstan and a Bravo music award in Russia. The video of her performing “Stone Cold” during “The Voice Kids” has reached 30 million views on YouTube.
Frankfurt recently hosted a business forum that presented Kazakh investment opportunities to 60 German businesses and investors. Kazakh Invest representative in Germany Hans Bischoff briefed participants about doing business in Kazakhstan and promising areas for investments. Businesses also discussed joint projects, one being the construction of a 100 MW solar power plant in Saran, Karaganda region. Kazakh Ambassador to Germany Bolat Nussupov said the sides are also negotiating the construction of two meat processing plants in Kazakhstan. Germany has been among the biggest investors in the Kazakh economy, and German companies have invested nearly $4.2 billion into Kazakhstan since 2005, with 90 percent of those investments going toward the non-primary sector.
The National Museum of Kazakhstan has unveiled the “Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum” exhibition in Suwon Ipark Museum of Art (SIMA) in Suwon, a city in South Korea not far from Seoul. The exhibition brings together more than 100 works by 57 artists focusing on the post-Soviet and contemporary period. “The project is an example of the first successful organisation of a large scale display of Kazakh modern art in the international arena. Nearly 400 works and archive documents by 94 artists were on display in four cities: London, Berlin, Jersey City and Suwon,” said project curator Roza Abenova. The exhibition seeks to identify Kazakh art narratives by studying the art of artists of Soviet period and contemporary artists, as well as the birth of contemporary art in independent Kazakhstan.
A Kazakh delegation participated in the 13th Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) of the Central Asia plus Japan dialogue in Tokyo. The platform was first convened in 2004 and covered five areas – political dialogue, interregional cooperation, stimulating business, intellectual dialogue, cultural ties and humanitarian exchange. The meeting agenda included issues such as regional security, tourism, transport and logistics, agriculture, trade and investments. The sides also discussed the upcoming ministerial meeting in December in Dushanbe. The Kazakh delegation told the gathering about the recent initiative of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev to set up a security organisation in Asia and proposed the consideration of establishing a network of regional centres of border cooperation in Central Asian countries and launching pilot freight transport from Japan to Europe through the Kazakh-Chinese logistics terminal in the Lianyungang port.
Kazakh director Emir Baigazin won the best film award at the Lisbon and Sintra Film Festival, held Nov. 16-25, for his “Ozen” (River). “Ozen” tells the story of five young brothers living in a remote farm in the middle of the Kazakh steppes with their strict father, who demands obedience from them and justifies his control by saying he must protect his children from the outside world and its dangers. The nearby river that the boys suddenly discover becomes their getaway, but the arrival of Kanat, a boy hailing from the city with his modern gadgets, disrupts the family’s rural and isolated life. Announcing the award winner, jury member Martha Argerich said the Kazakh film is a “wonderful film with unusual expressiveness, poetic power, hypnotism, grandeur and humanism and a unique film that struck from the first shot.”
