Mankurt

The film was partially filmed on location in Syria and in Turkey, representing a Turkish-Soviet cooperation in filmmaking. The film is based on one narrative strand within the novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chinghiz Aitmatov, a philosophical tale about what can happen to people if they forget their motherland, language, and history. The Turkic legend mentioned in the novel tells about a cruel way of making a mankurt of a captive man in the hopes that he will forget everything but basic activities and, thus, becomes an ideal slave of Djungar masters. The film is about a Turkmenian who defends his homeland from invasion. He is captured, tortured, and brainwashed into serving his homeland's conquerors. He is so completely turned that he kills his mother when she attempts to rescue him from captivity.