Dias Kozhantayev
Profile
Creative Producer at Warner Bros. Discovery, creating viral video content for Max and Eurosport. In 2025, three of his projects were nominated for the GEMA Awards. He is also active as an actor and appeared in Dune: Part Two.
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Kuanysh Maden
How Movie Posters Are Made Three designers explain the ideas behind posters for Oscar-winning and Kazakhstani films The Oscars do not have a category for “Best Movie Poster,” nor do they have a category for “Best Title Sequence,” which was included at the very first ceremony in 1929 but disappeared as early as 1930. That is why, in 2025, we decided to conduct an experiment: we provided Kazakhstani designers with all the posters of the films nominated for the 2025 Oscars and asked them to choose the best ones. Creating a poster is an art of conveying an entire film universe through a single visual image. A successful poster becomes part of the film’s history and stays with us long after we leave the cinema. As designer Kuanysh Maden, who worked on posters for the films “My Name is Kozha,” “Patrol,” and “Shulamah,” notes, the process of creating them often takes place under tight deadlines and with limited resources. “Quite often, you have to build posters from screenshots because filming ended a long time ago. Improving image quality and adding effects takes a lot of time,” he says. Asem Ramazanova, who created posters for “Mergen,” “The Black, Black Man,” and “Summer of 1941,” draws attention to the role of typography: “A font is not just text; it is an important element of visual style. In Western movie posters, you can notice a trend toward experimental, handwritten, or minimalist typefaces that help convey the mood of a film.” Igor Yug, the author of posters for “Taraz,” “Yolki 8,” and “Zhauap Ber,” speaks about the main approach used by Kazakhstani movie designers: “It is important that the viewer immediately understands the genre of the film and feels its emotion. In Kazakhstan, posters are more often focused on recognizability: large portraits of actors and an easily understandable color scheme.” While the global film industry continues to embrace complex compositions with numerous details, depth, and expressive visual techniques, Kazakhstan tends to favor simplicity and clarity.
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Kamila Saken
Founder of WeGlobal AI, a Kazakhstan-based EDTECH startup that uses artificial intelligence to identify high-risk teenagers in schools and automate psychological and academic support for students. The project aims to expand across schools throughout Kazakhstan and eventually enter the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We See More Than a School: How AI Helps Identify At-Risk Teenagers At Digital Bridge 2025, the Kazakhstan-developed WeGlobal AI platform was presented during the final stage of Astana Hub Battle. The platform combines psychological and academic support for school students, helping identify teenagers experiencing depression or a crisis at an early stage. According to co-founder Kamila Saken, the idea for the startup was inspired by a real-life case. At a small school, a 15-year-old student named Aruzhan appeared no different from her peers on the outside. However, she was suffering from severe depression and had even made suicide attempts. Neither the teachers nor the school psychologist knew about her condition. Like psychologists in many educational institutions, the school counselor was responsible for hundreds of students at the same time. The problem was identified only after the platform was introduced. The school psychologist noticed warning signs and invited the girl for a conversation, during which they discovered scars on her wrist. “In just one district where we operate, the system identified 539 students with severe depression whom the schools had no idea about,” Kamila emphasized. The WeGlobal AI platform works through a mobile application provided to students after their school subscribes to the service. Students complete psychological assessments, share their educational plans, and report academic difficulties. The system analyzes this data and generates recommendations for educators, helping identify students who may need additional support. At the same time, much of the administrative and paperwork burden is automated. The startup also offers additional educational products through its academic platform, including English-language courses and preparation programs for university admission and the SAT. This upselling mechanism has become a key part of the startup’s business model. According to the startup, its own online school currently generates approximately $330,000 per month, while a recent offline event for subscribed schools in Almaty generated an additional $42,000, with a 22% conversion rate. Operating since late 2023, the startup began in Kazakhstan and increased the number of its school clients from 8 to 800 within one year. The team’s next goal is to expand into the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, where the potential market is estimated at $2 billion. “We want not only to identify children who are at risk, but also to build an entire support ecosystem where teenagers have the tools they need for both psychological well-being and academic growth,” Kamila added.
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Adiya Makhambetova
A quantitative analyst at Fidelity Investments, where she develops mathematical models for portfolio management across trillion-dollar markets. She was named to Forbes Kazakhstan’s “30 Under 30” list as one of the country’s leading young professionals in finance. Adiya has loved mathematics since childhood. She graduated from the first Nazarbayev Intellectual School with a physics and mathematics focus in Astana and later earned a degree in Mathematics from Nazarbayev University. She subsequently obtained a master’s degree in Financial Engineering from Boston University. Today, Adiya works as a Quantitative Research Analyst at Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest investment companies. The firm has $13.7 trillion in assets under administration and $5.2 trillion in assets under management, serving approximately 50 million customers. A quant is a highly specialized professional in the financial industry whose work combines mathematics, programming, and finance. A quant’s role is to identify investment opportunities where the potential return significantly outweighs the associated risk. “Our group conducts mathematical research that serves as the foundation for mathematical models and algorithms used to create investment products. One example of such a product is an Exchange-Traded Fund, or ETF. We also help portfolio managers achieve stronger performance. They turn to quants to analyze the level of risk in their investment portfolios and evaluate the returns of investment operations against a benchmark index. In this way, we help maintain balanced portfolios that comply with strict contractual requirements, particularly when managing the funds of large institutional clients,” Adiya explains. Adiya is also responsible for thematic research at the company. One of her most recent projects focused on finding ways to attract younger investors to the company. “We want to attract not only university students, but even teenagers. This is one of the company’s strategic goals. In a few years, they will go to university and then enter the workforce. Once they have disposable income they want to invest, they will most likely trust us with their money,” Adiya explains. In addition, the Kazakhstani professional manages a lineup of 13 thematic Solo FidFolio portfolios, a product that gives individual investors access to direct indexing.
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