ARCTIC ART HOUSE: RUSSIAN REGION NURTURES LOCAL FILM BOOM
In Russia’s remote Yakutia region the film industry is booming, despite shooting schedules being restricted by some of the coldest winters on Earth and directors blaming ‘spirits’ for disturbing the production crew.
Six time zones away from the country’s film schools and without central state funding for its filmmakers, the region nonetheless produces half of all Russian movies made outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg. “Everybody wants to make movies,” said Alexei Romanov, who turned his back on a promising career as a filmmaker in Saint Petersburg three decades ago to return to his native Siberia.
“We have films with miniscule budgets and hilariously small fees but they make more in the cinemas here than Hollywood blockbusters,” he said. When the director came back to Yakutia, a vast territory that is home to fewer than a million people, the local industry consisted of just two cameramen. Now, thanks in part to his efforts, people are ‘fighting for cameras’ to finish their projects before equipment starts failing in winter temperatures that regularly drop to -50°C.
Romanov estimated an average local movie budget to be between US$40,000 and US$80,000. Most actors basically work for free on skeleton budgets, hoping to eventually get paid from box office revenues. But domestic and foreign audiences are starting to notice the region's output. Last year, a Yakutian film The Lord Eagle about an elderly couple living with an eagle in the forest, received the top prize at the Moscow Film Festival. South Korea’s Busan Film Festival, one of the most important in Asia, in 2017 showed a dozen Yakutia productions in a special retrospective, praising their unique cinematic style.
Locals jokingly call Yakutia’s movie industry ‘Sakhawood’, derived from the region’s other name, the Republic of Sakha. Yakutia’s unexplored wildernesses steeped in folk legends and shamanic traditions have piqued festival interest, but Sakhawood's genres are surprisingly varied. Recent premieres have included Republic Z, a zombie apocalypse sparked by a virus buried in permafrost. Another new release was Cheeke, a crime comedy about disco dance-offs, with a green-moustached hero.
Romanov - one of the founders of Sakhafilm, Yakutia's main production company - said global art-house interest could be explained by Yakutia's mixed culture. “We’re Asians on the one hand, and Northerners on the other,” combining themes of survival with Turkic heritage, he said.