Aitore Zholdaskali

Aitore Zholdaskali (also written Aitor Zholdaskali) is a Kazakh director who grew up in Almaty. He dropped out of a directing course at Turan University after two months, filmed weddings and then music videos for Kazakh artists, and was named in Forbes Kazakhstan's 30 Under 30. His YouTube web series Sheker, which began in November 2020, passed 20 million views and won a prize at South Korea's Asia Contents Awards.

With Igor Tsai he co-directed Shulamah, a feature about Kazakh rap, before making his first solo feature, Sicko (Auru, 2025), in which an indebted couple fake a cancer diagnosis to crowdfund online. Fantasia reports it took around $2 million at home despite a 21+ rating. It played festivals including Rotterdam and won the Black Raven competition in Brussels.

For the AI studio Higgsfield he directed Hell Grind, a 95-minute action fantasy he co-wrote with Adilkhan Yerzhanov. A 15-person team, mostly in Almaty, made it in about two weeks with Higgsfield's Soul Cinema and Soul Cast and the Seedance 2.0 video model; its first 25 minutes alone took 16,181 generations to yield 253 shots. Higgsfield put the cost near $500,000. It was shown at an industry event in Cannes in May 2026, beside but not part of the festival.

He and Adilet Abish then led nine directors in a 28-person team on The Cully Hill Boys, a 110-minute action comedy from a Tim Planagan script. Shots were generated from text and reference assets with Seedance in Higgsfield's Cinema Studio, using licensed likenesses of Israel Adesanya, Quinton Jackson, N3on and Matt Kiatipis; Higgsfield gave the budget as about $2 million. After a New York premiere it was posted free online on 10 August 2026 with its prompts, and reactions were mixed.