ITELMEN STORIES
Estonia, 2010, 68 min
Liivo Niglas
28.01.2012 13:15
The action in the film revolves around an ancestrally used practice of hunting sable by net. Set in rural Kamchatka in the Russian Far East, where fewer than 20 speakers of Itelmen remain, the film goes beyond its original aim to recapture a language and a hunting practice that are remembered but no longer in use. Two hunters encounter the wild environs and villages of Kamchatka as a history laden homeland and memories, nostalgia, resignation and hope echo throughout the film.
Liivo Niglas, born in Estonia in 1970 is currently a lecture of ethnology at University of Tartu, Estonia. He also runs an independent production company, Mp Doc, for anthropological documentary films. He has made films in Siberia, Africa, Central Asia and North America. Some of his work are “The Brigade” (2000), “Yuri Vellas´s World” (2003), “Adventure High” (2004), “Making Rain” (2007).
Director and production: Liivo Niglas
Language of dialogues: Russian, Itelmen
Language of subtitles: English
Lauching of film and award (selection):
International Festival of Ethnological Film, Belgrade, Serbia, 2011. Grand Prix.
Sardinia International Ethnographic Film Festival, Nuoro, Italy, 2010
Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY, Torun, Poland, 2010
Parnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival, Parnu, Estonia, 2011
Consuming images is a daily experience. Before learning how to read words, we learn to read pictures. Details are the keys that help us to contextualize, to compose countless notions of the whole from which we now see just the extract contained in a once chosen framing. But are we ever really able to reconstruct past moments depicted in foreign photograph that are someone´s materialized memories? Can we reach a clear undestanding of what should be remembered when already two people looking at a picture see two different picture just as two people with open eyes see two different worlds? Watching a photograph together means to journey on different paths into the past..Still the viewers eyes can meet – in a wine glass on the left bottom corner.
What should antropological films be like? How to come to terms with alternating view of the world and with stereotypes in us? In a 3-year span, this issue kept busy an execution team around Milan Durňak who went back to his home-village to capture life of Roma people together with their Ruthenian neighbours. Every stay in the Roma colony brought one episode of a film which captures everyday life, tries to describe problems which trouble them and constantly strive to jump over their own shadows. The spectator has a chance to encounter a story in a social-cummunity centre with a hard-working mayor and festivals in the village and think about the worries and merriments of one Roma colony.
