Each viewer is likely to come away from Life of Ivanna (Zhizn Ivanny), winner of the best documentary award in El Gouna, with a different takeaway. Some will find Renato Borrayo Serrano’s incredibly up-close account of life on the Siberian tundra a goldmine of ethnographic information; others will remark the effects of climate change that are killing off local reindeer and destroying a traditional way of life. Parents may wax indignant over the casual upbringing (read: borderline neglect) of small children, who become independent fast under a lack of parental supervision. But everyone will agree that Ivanna, the 26-year-old mother of eight who is at the heart of this extremely candid doc, is a survivor who deserves a round of applause.
She is a woman with a strong personality who makes people stand up and take notice. She smokes a lot, and with gusto. She drinks when she visits her husband Gena in the city, which is rarely. She occasionally curses and she drives a sleigh pulled by reindeer so fast and recklessly her kids fall off, but the tundra men admire her driving as “better than a man’s.” And she struggles non-stop to make ends meet and feed and clothe seven small children (her oldest daughter is in her early teens) with another one on the way. (Some of this tribe may belong to the neighbors.) The howling cold Siberian winter doesn’t make things easier, with the kids running in and out of their makeshift one-room house constructed on a sled, so it can be hitched to horses and moved when needed. Electricity is scarce and warmth comes only from a wood-burning stove.
But we love Ivanna for her indomitable spirit, evident in her stylish if a bit impractical way of dressing in thigh-high fur boots with slight heels and a variety of attractive fur coats. Outside her cubic insulated shack, the wind roars and the reindeer stand around motionless like life-size statues in a snowy garden. At one point a real snowstorm lashes at the little dwelling, and with the help of her neighbors Ivanna calmly turns the house around to keep the wind from overturning it.
Borrayo Serrano, a native-born Guatemalan now residing in Moscow, adopts an approach as laid-back as Ivanna’s. He never intervenes in the handheld shots, either to ask a question or direct attention somewhere. His totally non-judgmental attitude allows the viewer to get an unobstructed view of the family situation and the environment, of which Ivanna is a rebellious part. One only is reminded of the filmmaker’s presence indirectly; for instance, when two of the boys try to set the house on fire, or when the baby plays with a sharp kitchen knife, or when one of the kids wanders off alone into the night. At these moments it feels reassuring to know that the camera, and an adult, must be close at hand.
In the final movement of the film, Ivanna is forced to make a major decision and shift her brood 200 kilometers away to the city, where the kids can go to school and where she will try for a job at Gazprom. But relations with Gena, who is now violent, alcoholic and unemployable, seem difficult to patch up. They quarrel in a sickening scene fueled by booze and desperation and shot as one long, nightmarish break-up. Its veracity shows how integrated the filmmaker must have been to film such intimate and unpleasant moments. Although at one point in the film Ivanna turns to the camera and says “don’t shoot”, this is not it.
Shot over a four-year period, the film sees the children growing up and, with a pang of regret, we watch them settle into a new, radically untraditional lifestyle in a Russian school. Yet one is left with a deep respect for this young woman who won’t let herself be beaten by the harshness of life or the challenges that undoubtedly await her.
Director, screenwriter: Renato Borrayo Serrano
Producers: Vladislav Ketkovich
Cinematography: Daria Sidorova, Renato Borrayo Serrano
Editing: Inge-Lise Langfeldt, Renato Borrayo Serrano
Music: Timo Steiner
Sound design: Israel Banuelos
Production companies: Ethnofund Film Company (Romania), Ten Thousand Images (Norway), Illume OY Company (Finland)
World sales: CATS&Docs (France)
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Documentary Competition)
80 minutes
