A folk tale disguised as a documentary, Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan appears something like actual reality, half-planned and half-found. Long handheld takes of dust storms and emerging tornados and lightning storms in the ostensibly uninhabitable Betpak Dala desert region of Kazakhstan find, somewhere in the foreground, a story of a few farmers walking among their sheep and huts, whose goal seems less to cultivate the land than protect themselves from it. Asa (Askat Kuchinchirekov) comes to live with his sister's Spartan family and to marry the elusive Tulpan, a girl who watches his stuttering marriage proposal from behind a drape and turns him down immediately. Perhaps because he's been rejected, or perhaps because she's the only other girl in miles, Asa decides he's in love. "I'll never forget how you looked at me behind the curtains," he tells her later, even though he's still never seen her, just after he's chased her into a shed and her mother throws cucumbers at him from behind.  David Phelps