With Bad Bad Winter, her first feature film, Olga Korotko locks us inside a claustrophobic space where morality and justice collapse, revealing the state of a Kazakh society traumatized by communism and plagued by delinquency, corruption, and social fractures.
On one side stands the protagonist, the daughter of a wealthy businessman who returns to her hometown after her grandmother’s death to sell the family house. On the other side are her former classmates who come to visit her — but not to reminisce about the good old days. After accidentally killing a man, they are searching for the grandmother’s money, hidden in small bills inside the house, hoping to avoid prison.
Neither executioners nor victims — or perhaps both at once. Caught between survival and morality, confinement and justice, the filmmaker confronts us with these ethical dilemmas through characters who directly endure the consequences of communism, in a world where crime goes unpunished if money changes hands. When justice is replaced by corruption and class hierarchy, it is hardly surprising that these young people’s moral compass has disintegrated.
Through oppressive lighting, numerous static shots, and the use of off-screen space, the director builds a suffocating tension that gradually transforms the house into a closed world reflecting their own pathological imprisonment.
Bad Bad Winter is a tightly controlled drama, driven by its rigorous direction and chilling screenplay.
Aurore Garot
Toute la culture

Outside, the Kazakh winter rages, while inside, the dacha seems so warm and peaceful. The young woman who inherits it hesitates to sell it off cheaply, as if liquidating the old world. A world from before that resists and will make its presence felt in a last, reckless, and tragic stand. Surgical and relentless, Olga Korotko’s direction scrutinizes gestures and glances, even the slightest silences. And through them, the slow and irreversible work of insidious corruption of friendship, morality, and justice, brought down by the new class relations of a decaying society.
The characters of Bad Bad Winter are also the grandchildren of Raskolnikov and the obscure disaster of the Soviet utopia; thus, for them, if “communism is dead, everything is permitted.” Both victims and perpetrators, they are prisoners of a closed-door drama that also reflects the almost pathological confinement of a society in the throes of an ethical crisis.
But, while in Dostoevsky crime seeks its punishment, in Olga Korotko’s version, punishment will likely find only the innocent: what then is a crime in a country where class law has replaced all notion of justice?
A worthy disciple of Darezhan Omirbaev, Olga Korotko delivers in turn an abrasive and audacious moral tale, illuminated by the palpable tension of a mute heroine whose every pore of her face continuously expresses the violence of an intimate conflict as heartbreaking as it is chilling.
Vladimir Perišić & Laurent Bécue-Renard
Filmmakers of ACID