Kazakhstan : danger in the steppes | |

This latest Impossible Roads takes us into Kazakhstan. In this central Asian country, lying on the borders of China and Russia, and four times the size of France, everything is harsh: the climate, the steppe, dotted with its oil wells, even the character of its people, descendants of the Mongols of Genghis Khan, chiseled to confront every challenge nature presents.

Shot at the end of winter, this film takes us into a snowstorm, with thousands of travellers stuck in a gigantic road jam, with the unluckiest of them left in the mud, surprised by a sudden thaw. We also meet with farmers, camel breeders, clinging to a thankless landscape. Or we visit the shores of what was once the Aral Sea, totally dried up by over-exploitation during the Soviet period of the river waters that fed into it. It has now given way to a desert of sand and salt whose toxic dust is breathed in by the local population.

A voyage of the extreme, in the company of endearing characters, whose hardships never make any dent in their courage and their dignity. Once again, Impossible Roads shows us, without cosmetics or sentimentality, how people live at the other end of the world.