Pushkin House in collaboration with the 17th Native Spirit Film Festival presents a double bill dedicated to the Sakha, an indigenous people living in Siberia, in particular in the city of Yakutsk, which is considered the coldest city on the planet.
French filmmaker Chris Marker made a trip there in the 1950s, which resulted in the travelogue Letter from Siberia. In this film, his personal ethnographic observations combine with poetry and political analysis, and the heterogeneous image includes animation, adverts and archival materials in addition to documentary footage. At the same time, Marker made the film primarily about the construction and rapid development of Soviet Siberia from a Frenchman's point of view, and he leaves aside the problems of colonisation of this territory and does not give credit to the indigenous peoples living there.
Interestingly, Letter from Siberia became one of the first films in which Svetlana Romanova saw her native region. 65 years later, she created a kind of response letter to Marker with the help of fellow filmmaker Chelsea Tuggle, speaking for and on behalf of the local community. Тарыҥ (Season of Dying Water) shows Yakutsk and its surroundings as a complex and unique space in which traditional customs coexist with youth subcultures against a backdrop of colonial and capitalist violence.
Letter from Siberia
dir. Chris Marker
1957, 62 min
In French with English subtitles
Тарыҥ (Season of Dying Water)
dir. Svetlana Romanova, Chelsea Tuggle
2022, 63 min
In Yakut and Russian with English subtitles
This event was made possible thanks to the support of the Institut français du Royaume-Uni.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Svetlana Romanova is an Eveni/Sakha filmmaker and artist.
Chelsea Tuggle is a filmmaker and artist living in Los Angeles.
Chris Marker (1921–2012) was a French documentary filmmaker, multimedia artist, writer and photographer. He is associated with the Left Bank group of the French New Wave and known as one of the pioneers of the essay film.