But it is not a simple adventure. Sadikov cut the film in pieces and mixed them. It starts from the end, it goes back and forward, the race you see four times, every time from other eyes. And between the scenes there are dreams: a yurt burning in red colour, black cows walking over frozen river, and a man with a bull mask who is watching her. Every Iradi knows who this is. I will not write his name here at night.

In 1968 the people did not understand it at all. The Moscow newspapers said "formalism", and after few months it was taken from the cinemas. For Sadikov it was a heavy blow, ten years he made only documentaries after. Since 1992 the Talasfilm Archives show their copy again, and now young people come to see it.

This is the plan which the committee approved. But then Karimov added things which were not in the script. The Elders read railway timetables all together. An accordion orchestra plays on the salt flat, and a man in a suit sweeps around them. The head lands in a kolkhoz canteen and they give it soup. There are letters in Syriac which nobody translates, and a discussion only in numbers. In the last ten minutes Kuban rides to the camera and never comes closer.

The head was real, seven metres, plywood and plaster on iron, hanging from a crane, because no money for helicopter. In 1977 people walked out of the cinema in big numbers, I saw it myself, I was the one who had to show it to an empty hall. After Karimov was banned from directing in 1983 the film was taken away completely. But in the 1990s the students found it again on video copies, copy from copy from copy, and now they make midnight screenings and shout the numbers together.

Daniyar takes five men: a deserter who knows the wells, an old horse thief, two brothers from another clan, and a Russian railwayman with a stopwatch. Many days they watch the fort from the dunes. Then the theft, in the night: almost thirty minutes without one word and without music. They put felt on the hooves and take the horses out one by one. In 1979 in my cinema nobody in the hall was breathing. You could hear the projector.

After this, on the way back, everything goes wrong. Kara-Bek's riders are coming behind like dust on the horizon, the wells are poisoned, and the men start to fight for the herd. In the end, on a salt flat at noon, there is a long, long standoff. More I will not say. Only that the last shot will stay with you.

In the Soviet Union almost 18 million people saw it in the first year. It got the Special Jury Prize at the All-Union Festival in 1980, and it was even shown in New York, and the New York Times wrote that you feel like you are there, under the hard sun. Correct! Interesting fact: first the director was Timur Aslanov, but at the start of filming the studio put Sadikov instead. And Sadikov says he is not interested in westerns at all. Life is funny.

It begins with one hour of a man in a loincloth and a wild horse on a hillside. He comes close, he ropes it, at the end he rides it. No words, no music, and it looks like no cut. Sometimes they both go out of the picture and you look at empty grass for minutes. (Between us: the camera magazine holds only ten minutes, so it cannot be one take. The technicians joined it where they leave the frame. But it is still magic.) The horse is Tuman, the grey stallion of the studio horse unit. Three weeks they filmed it.

After this come short episodes: the heavenly horses, the Silk Road merchants, the Turks, the missionaries, the Mongols, Kokand. Before each one, some minutes of a voice speaking over black screen. In the 1916 episode, the flight over the mountain passes, Almaz Sarybaev plays a chieftain, only one scene, fourteen minutes, and it is very strong. Then the revolution, the kolkhoz, the oil of Kobozev, the Toktogul dam, and at the end horses are grazing under the power lines.

Another strange thing: the narrator says "I, the people" all the first part, and in the second part he suddenly says "you", to us in the hall. Some say it is genius, some say they just forgot. People say that in Leningrad there was a riot in a cinema because the public wanted money back during the first hour. Nobody can prove it. I believe it.

There she is in danger. Men take her horse and attack her, she escapes with her father's knife, and for two days they hunt her in the canyons. At a spring something happens which she will never tell to anybody. At the end she finds the herd and her father at a river crossing, and she says nothing. The last scene, a dream with a hand coming out of the sand, I still see sometimes when I close my eyes.

In 1981 the newspapers praised it: the tension, the desert pictures, the actress. But I must be honest. Today many people say the film shows the Karatau people, the Eski El, as wild and frightening, like animals, and this is not fair to them, and that the scenes of the attack are filmed too long, in a bad way. Karimov called himself "pervert of the screen". Well. I think they are right.

Very simple story, and very beautiful pictures. The cameraman is Kadyrbek Asylbekov, who worked also on Desert Sun's Rebellion, and you can see it, the same golden desert. It was one of the first films made after Desert Sun's Rebellion in the same style, and this silent man without a name, after this film he is in every Eastern of the 1980s. Every boy in Talas wanted to be him, and walked around with a scarf on his face. Rakhimov later made the comedy The Silver Horseshoe (1984), but that is another story.

When it came out, almost nobody noticed. No advertising, and the public who came for "the director of Desert Sun's Rebellion" said it is too slow, and went home. But now, after the war, it is different. Many of the places in this film are not the same any more. Some are not there at all.

Many old friends are here. The warlord is again Erkin Sultanbekov, our Kara-Bek, the best bad man of the steppe. Almaz Sarybaev has a smaller role. The camera is Vladimir Pak and the music is Asan Jumabaev, the same two as in Desert Sun's Rebellion. Many people say this is the last great Eastern, the top of the mountain. After it the genre went down, and by the end of the 1980s it was finished.

Shakirov did not make another film. In 1992, in the siege of Talas, a mortar hit his home and he was killed. He was a good man and a real talent.

This is the second film of Amankulov, after Track of the Snow Leopard (1983), and the camera is again Kadyrbek Asylbekov. The long riding scenes are all with trained horses, no doubles, and you feel it. One of the three horses is our old friend Tuman, the grey stallion from Rise of Glory. The real story of this film is the friendship between the man and his horses. It was one of the last Easterns, the cycle was almost finished then.