Goliath

In a village ruled by fear, a disabled widower named Arzu is pulled into the orbit of the very crime boss responsible for his wife’s death. As he rises through the ranks and becomes the man’s trusted aide, his quiet grief begins to take on a more dangerous shape.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Goliath is not just a revenge story set on the Kazakh steppe; it is also part of the director’s larger cinematic map of Karatas, the fictional village that keeps reappearing across his work. In this film, Karatas becomes a stripped-down arena of fear, dependency and power, turning one man’s private grief into something closer to a political fable.

What makes the film especially striking is the way it recasts the western in Central Asian terms. Festival programmers and critics repeatedly described it as a western-style or revenge-western retelling of the David and Goliath myth, while Yerzhanov himself framed it as a story about power, tyranny, revenge and the strange attachment ordinary people can develop toward their oppressors. That gives the film a double life: it works as a hard, lean genre piece, but also as an allegory about dictatorship and moral surrender.

The film also marked another major international festival stop for Yerzhanov. Goliath screened in the Orizzonti Extra section at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where its 93-minute Kazakh-language production was presented as a Kazakhstan-Russia co-production. The Venice listing also credits a notable creative team behind the camera, including cinematographer Aydar Sharipov, editor Azamat Utianov and musician Galymzhan Moldanazar.