The country of production: Yakutia

The film "Legends of Eternal Snow Snow" received the main prize at the cinema festival in the language of indigenous peoples in Toronto. Vladimir Kocharyan talks about the picture

On June 8, the film of the Yakut director Alexei Romanov “Legends of Eternal Snegles” was awarded awards for the best work in the language of indigenous peoples at the Imaginenative festival in Toronto. This festival, passing for the 25th time, is considered a kind of “Oscar” for a movie that reflects the culture of the indigenous peoples of the world. Over the past two decades, Yakut cinema has repeatedly participated in various programs of the review. The award “Legends of Eternal Snow Snow” reflects an important trend, in the mainstream of which the film industry of the Republic of Sakha continues to develop.

Yakut films are one of the few of Russia who manages to overcome barriers related to restrictions on participating in international festivals, especially when we are talking about projects that have received state funding.

Thus, the film “Legends of Eternal Sners” shot with the support of the Sakhafilm state studio was also previously presented in one of the programs of the prestigious Rotterdam Film Festival and became the winner of the Bishkek film festival. Yakut films continue to participate not only in Asian, but also in European festivals even at a time when Russian cinema is allowed mainly by directors in exile, often with a pronounced anti -war message. An example of this is the German Goeast festival, where the republican directors retained their presence after 2022. European curators conditionally separate the Yakut cinema from the Russian. In some cases, this division is expressed even in the wording: the column “country of production” is indicated not by Russia, but by Yakutia.

Director of "Legends of Eternal Snow Snows" Alexei Romanov is a cult figure. Along with Gennady Bagynanov and Semyon Ermolaev, he is considered one of the ancestors of the Yakut cinema as a national movement aimed at the revival of the cultural and philosophical traditions of the republic.

In the early nineties, it was thanks to Romanov and the team of associates that the still -current film studio “Sakhafilm” was created. It became the main production base for Yakut filmmakers, as well as a cultural institution around which the film of the first wave of the 90s was formed.

The central film in the creative biography of the director is “Medic for example. ORTO HOUSE ”(1993) - hybrid work performed at the junction of documentary cinema and historical reconstruction. The fascinating frames of the rituals of the past are replaced by scenes in which these practices come to life in the modern version of the festival of Yysiah - the central event in the religious philosophy of the Sakha people. This mounting transition has become a symbolic manifesto - a sign that the nation again acquires its voice, which seemed to be lost during the times of the USSR. The film reflected the request of the Yakut society of the beginning of the nineties to cultural self -determination, and also laid many ideological traditions, which Yakut filmmakers and Alexei Romanov himself adhere to this day.

“Eternal Snow Legends”-a new work of the director-this is a row-muy in the endless snowy expanses of pre-revolutionary Yakutia. In the center of the plot is the tragic fate of the Evenki girl Kiluk, which representatives of the noble Yakut merchant come to match. Alas, during the pre -revolutionary Yakutia, the price of female freedom was equated with the size of Kolym, and, despite external care, the girl’s parents eventually agree to give their young daughter in exchange for a generous dowry proposed by representatives of the elderly groom. Kiluk is not forced to go on a journey through the winter and the impenetrable blizzard to his unenviable future. Three men become its companions, each of which is like a mask from an ancient Greek tragedy, hiding under him one of the eternal human features: passion, greed, duty.

The heroine of the film is not a submissive victim, but a figure of resistance trying to break out of the script imposed on her. At the key moment of the narrative, the film makes a sharp turn: the picture changes not only the plot direction, but also the visual language. The forgotten past pursuing one of the travelers returns not by an abstract shadow, but comes to life in the image of a ghost - like restless spirits from Yakut mythology, who act as judges and regional guardians. This ghost is an avenger and an arbitrator who carries his unshakable justice and ready to pronounce the sentence to each of the heroes, connecting their fate with the depths of the traditional beliefs of Sakha.

Romanov, Romanov in 1986, the short film "Mappa" based on the story of the classic of Yakut literature Nikolai Zabolotsky became the plot basis for "Legends of Eternal Snow Snow Snows." The story of the tragically dead girl Mapp is a classic example of the image of a “outcast” society. Rejected by her people, she renounces life and doom herself to the existence of “between the worlds”, in the eternal expectation of a traveler. If in the 1980s the fate of Mapps echoed with the position of Yakut culture-frozen in the intermary, deprived of the opportunity to be heard-then in a modern interpretation the author makes a radical gesture: now she speaks in full voice. She is ready to avenge those who betrayed her, destroy the shackles of gender injustice, to defend the right to their pain and injury. Her return is not an allegory, but a physical presence, albeit still in the appearance of an vengeful ghost.

The film, unique in its artistic and narrative method, is a difficult test for an unprepared viewer. But for the audience of the native republic, it sounds exactly and deeply, because he speaks with him in the same language and literally at the level of metaphors. Despite the recognition at festivals in Russia and abroad, the picture did not go out in the wide Russian rental, limiting herself to the rental inside Yakutia. "Legends of eternal snow" become an involuntary allusion to the situation with Yakut cinema as a whole. Physically, being inside Russia, it remains as if in the shade-like a ghost of a distant, alien culture that the Russian public is still not ready to really see and hear.