Photo credit: biff.kr
Not many filmmakers can say they have experienced filming at extreme subzero temperatures in one of the harshest winter environments in the entire world. But for Russian film director Stepan Burnashev, who hails from the Sakha Republic located in far Eastern Russia, shooting his 2014 crime drama film Outlaw at –50 deg C was all in a day’s work.
“The shooting process was hard. I was really scared about our expensive camera and we had to protect it with a handmade warm bag,” he recalled, adding that the warmest day during the 15-day shooting period for his feature film was still a whopping –36 deg C. Temperatures in the region can go down to –60 deg C in the winter, and soar up to 40 deg C in the summer.
Burnashev was one of several film directors from the Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, in attendance at the 22nd Busan International Film Festival for a special showcase on contemporary Sakha Cinema. Titled “Sakha Cinema: World of Magical Nature and Myth”, the showcase featured seven feature-length works and five shorts that shone a light on the past 30 years of the region’s unexplored film scene from the 1990s to 2017.
Above: This year’s Special Program in Focus was a showcase on Sakha cinema, featuring seven feature-length works and five shorts from the Sakha Republic
Russian film director Stepan Burnashev (above) presented his 2014 crime drama film Outlaw
at the 22nd Busan International Film Festival. Photo credit: Ivan Semenov
In the last five years Sakha cinema has been slowly gaining attention on the film festival circuit, from appearing in the Berlinale’s programme on indigenous cinema this February to rising Russian film director Dmitri Davidov’s debut After Bonfire premiering in the Flash Forward section at BIFF 2016. Still, the region’s national cinema remains relatively closed off to the mainstream international film audiences, with some films not having seen the light of day outside the Sakha Republic for decades. 64-minute feature film Summer Homestead, for instance, was having its world premiere at BIFF this year, 25 years after it was completed in 1992.
Yakut film director Alexey Romanov, who is regarded as the first professional filmmaker in the Sakha Republic, said: “This collection of films that you see today is the birth of the very first stages of Sakha cinema. Back then, we didn’t even think of our intentional audience; we just wanted to make films to show to somebody, so it didn’t matter whether it was screened on television or in movie theatres. We just had a very big wish to make something.” Romanov was speaking to audiences at BIFF’s showcase following the screening of his 1986 20-minute short Mappa.
Above: Director Alexey Romanov plays the traditional instrument Khomus, or a mouth harp for the audience during a Guest Visit.
According to Russian film critic Sergey Anashkin, it is difficult to pin down an exact date when Sakha cinema first emerged. While the first Sakha film was a graduation film made by Romanov in the mid-1980s, Sakha cinema only began to bloom after the official state film company Sakha film was created in 1992. Prior to that, no films were made in the Sakha Republic during the Soviet Era; any films made about its people were instead shot all around Russia and the Soviet Union in very distant regions.
Anashkin said: “There was a film called The Gold of The Ancestors, and the action was set in Yakutia but it was shot in Tajikistan, which is thousands of kilometres away and a lot hotter than Yakutia. So we can imagine what extent of authenticity they were able to achieve at those times.”
There has been a momentous rise in Sakha cinema since the millennium, thanks to an increasing number of young, adventurous filmmakers and a supportive filmmaking environment without the interference of authorities. According to Romanov, the Sakha Republic is currently ranked third in Russia in terms of rates of film production after Moscow and Saint Petersburg, with an estimated 10 to 15 feature films produced in the region each year.
And even though shooting films in the Russian language would allow Yakut filmmakers to distribute their works to a larger audience, most films continue to be produced in Yakut, the Republic’s official state language, specifically catering to the region’s small population of over 950,000.
Anashkin said: “Many filmmakers are self-taught; they are not scared of anything and they want to make films. Sakha cinema is not propaganda — it shows the real life that people live, and you can hear the real language on screen.”
This distinctive cinematic style of Sakha cinema is apparent at BIFF’s showcase, with elements of magical realism and story lines that combine folk legends and religions with contemporary values. Films also feature the alluring natural environment and continental climate of the Sakha Republic, which natives believe hold an intricate connection to the spiritual world.
For instance, His Daughter, one of the seven feature films screened at BIFF’s special showcase, is a coming-of-age story about a little girl named Tanya who lives in a remote village. A poetic examination of life and death, the 2016 film charts Tanya’s growth through the changing seasons and explores Yakutia’s natural environment and continental climate in relation to the spiritual world, which natives believe are intricately connected. His Daughter also introduces audiences to a unique geographical formation of Yakutia: an alas, which is a shallow depression that usually forms in snow forests and develops from the subsidence of permafrost, following repeated melting and re-freezing.
Above: Still from His Daughter by Tatiana Everstova. Photo credit: biff.kr
Director Tatiana Everstova said: “I wanted to show the mentality of the Sakha people and how we believe in the irrational. I wanted to show the spiritual world through the winter days at night, when everything almost dies out and freezes down. In His Daughter life and death walk hand in hand, and the whirlwind you see in the film is believed by the Sakha people to be the soul of a restless, dead person.”
Romanov added: “We rever our trees. Trees play an important part in the spiritual world, and there are some special trees that look different. We believe that these trees are inhabited by spirits.”
The poor technical quality of the film stills due to inadequate preservation was a problem for Romanov, however. “We have a film archive that was only established a few years ago, but they still lack some facilities like proper temperature storage. So unfortunately some of the films are in quite bad condition.”
For Everstova, the translation of His Daughter for Korean audiences, rather than the film’s visuals quality onscreen, was her biggest concern. Subtitling was a complicated process which involved translation from Yakut to Russian, then from Russian to English, and finally from English to Korean.
She said: “We inevitably might lose some meanings. I am a speaker of Russian and Yakut so I can control the translation, but unfortunately for Korean and English I am not a speaker of either languages. There was some philosophy in the lines that I really wanted to share with my audiences, and it is my hope that a good job was done.”