Stranger than fiction... In 1998, seven years after the independence of the country, the autocratic Kazahk president Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to move the capital city Almaty to Astana, in the northern steppes. Vertiginous towers spring out of the ground, financed by oil exports. The film opens with a presidential speech in 1997 on the future of Kazakhstan, boasting to “the three layers of society, the rich, the middle class and the poor” of the infinite promise of the free market. Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard observe the life of a new society, in the standardised and gaudy trappings of wealth. Through an ex-Soviet oligarchy in full expansion, a melancholy and poetic portrait of globalization.

Karaganda, Kazakhstan's second-largest city, located to the south of the steppes, was built in 1930 by displaced prisoners over a coalfield in the immense Karlag. Today, the basis of the city's economy is disappearing, leading to considerable impoverishment. « Mine de Rien » documents a time of instability, of transition between two states, feeling abandonment and capitalist hope. A state that has passed and a state which is just starting, intangible, inevitable. The film follows this transition, which generates chaos, adaptation and suffering, revealing the impossibility of being : at a time when human beings can no longer be considered as a mass, but a sum of individuals. En exploding population mapped over the geographical structure of the city.