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| | Don't blink now, it's Kazakhstan |
 | | At the end of the 1980s, cinema was the first cultural activity in Kazakhstan to feel the currents of freedom that Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika had unleashed. |
 | | A dozen young filmmakers who had trained at Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school returned home in 1987, including Serik Aprimov, Darezhan Omirbayev, Amir Karakulov, Talgat Temenov, all of whom would soon be winning prizes in major film festivals. |
 | | The story of the country’s film industry began with Rashid Nugmanov’s 1988 film The Needle, which was a big hit all over the then Soviet Union and one of the first films to break the taboo of talking about drug addiction. |
| www.unesco.org /courier/2000_10/uk/doss25.htm (349 words) |
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