In 1998, seven years after the independence of the country, autocratic president Kazakh Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to move the capital of Almaty to Astana, the barren plains of the north. Vertiginous towers of glass rise above ground, financed by oil exports. A presidential speech in 1997 on the future of Kazakhstan opens the film, praising the “three social levels, the ric......