Foreign ideas, native spaces: Crime and Punishment in recent Asian cinema

What is it about?

The article is about two films, Darezhen Omirbaev's Student (2012) and Lav Diaz's Norte, the End of History (2013), each of which transports Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment to a modern-day setting. Both filmmakers contrast the "Eastern," "native" values of the respective Kazakh and Filipino cultures to imported Western ones.

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Why is it important?

I explore the effects of post-colonialism in two societies, post-Soviet Kazakhstan and The Philippines, as mediated through Dostoevsky's discussion of the Western and native features of his Russian Empire. It shows the possibility of film adaptation to extend ideas from literature to cinema in new cultural and political contexts.