Baksy on AllMovie

In this modern-day fantasy from writer and director Guka Omarova, Aidai (Neisipkul Omarbekova) is an elderly woman living in a small village in Kazakhstan. Aidai has a variety of supernatural talents -- she can heal the sick, predict the future, and help others recover lost belongings or loved ones. While outsiders are often skeptical of Aidai's claims, locals are thoroughly convinced that her gifts are genuine, and one of the more prosperous men in the village, Batir (Farkhat Amankulov), purchased the property she calls home and lets her stay there for free as a show of gratitude after she helped his young son Asan (Almat Ayanov) recover from a deep depression when his mother passed on. Arman (Nurlan Alimzhanov) is an unscrupulous thug who wants to open a filling station on the property where Aidai stays, and while neither she or Batir are interested in selling, he's not willing to take no for an answer, and bullies the local police into arresting Aidai on the grounds that she's a fraud. However, Aidai has her own ways of proving that her talents as a shaman are for real. Baksy (the title comes from a Kazak word for "shaman") was an official entry at the 2008 Sochi Open Russian Film Festival.