Kazakh Cinema at a Crossroads: Institutional Continuities, Market Forces, and Creative Dynamics (1991-2024)

This thesis examines how Kazakhstan's national film sector that once operated as a Soviet cultural arm has been remodelled for a market economy without abandoning its socialist scaffold. Filling a gap in the literature on post-socialist creative industries, the study asks: what continuities and discontinuities have shaped Kazakh cinema's institutional organisation between 1991 and 2024, and with what creative and economic effects? To answer this, the thesis triangulates three evidence streams: fifty-one policy documents and statutes mapping governance reform and an IMDb-derived panel of all feature-length Kazakh releases since independence, analysed with bipartite social-network methods to track 2,470 director-writer collaborations. Combining qualitative policy analysis with empirical network metrics allows the project to capture both formal rule change and informal creative practice. Findings reveal alignment with institutional path plasticity, suggesting an incremental adaptation rather than rupture. Core Soviet bodies were seldom abolished. Instead, policy-makers layered new instruments such as cash-rebate schemes and digital tools onto existing hierarchies or tried to convert legacy entities like Kazakhfilm into hybrid public-private actors. Parallel industrial shifts evidence a pluralisation of production. Studios such as Sataifilm, Nurtas Production and Qara Studios normalised profitability, while web-native companies (Salem Entertainment) and OTT newcomers (Uni-Q/Unico Play) redirected finance and audience attention towards genre cinema and Kazakh-language streaming originals. Policy has tacitly endorsed this pivot through incentives like the Digital Content Rebate, signalling a new contest over narrative sovereignty in the platform era. Network analysis shows that the director-writer field evolved from a fragile, Kazakhfilm-centred hub in the 1990s to a segmented, polycentric web after 2014, in which generational clusters orbit loose-coupled brokers rather than a single state anchor. Yet veteran auteurs preserve status and influence, acting as a bridge between public subsidy and private capital. It confirms that institutional hierarchies still shape cultural industries. The thesis argues that this hybrid architecture, simultaneously market-responsive and statist, explains both the resilience of Kazakh cinema and its persistent stratification. Conceptually, it extends path-plasticity theory to cultural industries and offers a mixed-methods template for examining post-Soviet creative economies. Practically, it highlights how incremental rule change, rather than wholesale privatisation, can stimulate output while preserving symbolic assets, a lesson for other small-market cinemas navigating global platform pressures.