Omarova entered the film business back in the Soviet era as an actress for famed director Sergey Bodrov Sr. (who produced and co-wrote "Schizo"). She's a petite, composed and strikingly lovely woman whose age would be almost impossible to guess from her features (she's 36). As she explains, she's a Russian speaker of Eurasian heritage, or, in the derogatory phrase of rural Kazakh-language speakers, an "asphalt Kazakh." She also speaks charming English, even serving as a translator for Nusuppaev. He is just as grave as Schizo is in the film; the only smile I get from him is if I ask whether he'd rather stay in the U.S. or go back home. "He really, really, really wants to live in New York," Omarova says, laughing. (She herself now lives in Rotterdam.)

How much, I ask, does "Schizo" capture what life is like in Kazakhstan today? "Some people will say it's a little bit exaggerated," she says. "In the city, life is quite OK. But on the other hand, if you go to the countryside -- and we were shooting 60 kilometers outside Almaty -- it's a life like this. There is no electricity, no hot water.

"If you go by car across Kazakhstan, you will see lots of places where the electrical pole is standing there without wire. People cut it down and sell it for a small amount of money. But then they can buy bread. And also drink, of course." Indeed the characters in "Schizo" consume massive amounts of vodka, a legacy of Kazakhstan's long relationship with Russia. "Kazakh people didn't drink that much," she explains. "It all came from Russia and like all Asian people, Kazakh people had no gene to resist it. Now everybody drinks vodka, it's part of our culture. It makes you feel not so desperate."

When I ask whether the end of communism was a blessing or a curse for Kazakhstan, Omarova says, "I think it's mixed. It's really hard to say whether it was a positive or a negative. Well, there are definitely positives: We got independence, and now I can just choose to fly to the United States! But the first two years were extremely difficult. There was no money, there was terrible inflation."

The sometimes-fatal midnight boxing matches shown in "Schizo," she explains, are not entirely fictional. She conceived the original idea for the film after meeting a 23-year-old man in an Almaty cafe who looked much older, with swollen hands and a battered face. He told her he had survived a brutal beating, and she says she looked in his eyes and felt guilty. The story of Ali, the character who is beaten to death in "Schizo," is "the story of someone who came from the south of the country looking for a job, and did not succeed, and started to do illegal boxing," she says. "So it's real life, real stuff that sprang up after the Soviet Union collapsed. There were professional boxers and people from the street. Anybody who needed money."

Omarova cites the art-film gods of the '90s, Lars von Trier and Wong Kar-wai, as directors that have influenced her, but she also mentions "Raging Bull" ("That film by Scorsese, with De Niro as the boxer?"), and "Schizo" is flavored by both traditions. Viewers may differ in how they read the final scene, which in the time-honored fashion of Russian drama and literature seems to offer Mustafa the promise of a new life after his ordeal. "We don't want the audience to feel really depressed," Omarova laughs. She admits that the outlook for her native land is not so clear: "I hope Kazakhstan has a great future. But life at this moment -- it's dramatic."

"Schizo" opens March 18 in New York, March 25 in Boston and April 1 in Los Angeles and Washington, with other cities to follow.

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