00:00My biggest ambition about our festival is to gather all Central Asian musicians and
00:08make our biggest festival in Central Asia.
00:17So the goal is to make like kind of a Central Asian Coachella, that's the biggest dream
00:23I guess, and we have everything to make it happen.
00:34I got into events almost 10 years ago when I was a manager of a popular musician named
00:40Moldan Azar.
00:41At that time there were no concerts, no festivals, when we could perform only online.
00:47I came with an idea to like kind of arrange the concerts all around the country by myself.
00:56OU Fest came to life when we started our YouTube channel called OU Live.
01:02It's like online live, not concert, but live performance when we invite different artists.
01:13We made it by ourselves without any sponsors or partners.
01:17I was paying like from my pocket.
01:19The show went really popular, went really viral.
01:24We couldn't stop it because people loved it so much.
01:27But money goes really fast and I came with an idea to make a festival so we can get the
01:35money back.
01:50It is really important for me to showcase Kazakh talent because I noticed that there
01:56are a lot of talents out there, like in small cities, in rural areas, that no one knows
02:03about them.
02:04And I was having a dream so I could make a project that would gather them around to give
02:11them an opportunity to show themselves.
02:15That's why it's really important to me.
02:21The main difference for our festival, I guess, it is like everything we do is local.
02:30Other festivals try to invite foreign artists, famous artists from maybe from Europe, from
02:37the United States or everywhere.
02:39We don't do that.
02:40We make it only local line-up artists.
02:44We kind of support local businesses, local creative industry.
02:49We are actually in the most popular venue for the festivals in Almaty.
02:54It's called Pervomaiski Prudy.
02:57Probably most of the festivals are going here.
03:01Really huge place.
03:03We have the park there, we have the stage area, we have lake, we have some kind of cottages
03:13you can rent, you can live there, stay for the night and everything.
03:17Most memorable moment at Oyupes was 2022 when we are doing our first festival.
03:24That was kind of an experiment since we made a really experimental line-up from artists.
03:32Half of them were popular nowadays, rappers, groups and everything.
03:37And the second half was from artists, kind of forgotten artists.
03:43They were popular 10, 15, 20 years ago and we invited them to perform on our stage.
03:50And the last artist, it was like the end of the festival, the last artist, his name
03:55is Airat Murtasov, he came to the stage and the crowd went crazy.
03:59They were singing every single song and that was really like thrilling.
04:20If I would go back like three years ago and I would give myself an advice, don't be afraid,
04:34you're doing a great job.
04:37That would be my advice because every time I'm making any project, I'm questioning myself.
04:45Am I doing right?
04:46Am I doing wrong?
04:47So yeah, I would tell myself, don't be afraid.
Comments