The Sakha Republic in northeastern Siberia is a territory of Russia known for its severe temperatures and its track record of making horror films and historical dramas that speak of the trauma of its indigenous people’s ages-long oppression by the power brokers in the Kremlin. This is the setting for The Legends of Eternal Snow, an eerie new Yakut-language feature by Sakha cinema pioneer Aleksei Romanov, which screens in the Harbour section of the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Romanov reworks the supernatural Yakut folktale that was the basis for his famed 1986 short Maappa, the first fiction film in the Sakha language, into a wider story about societally wronged and unruly young women. Maappa kick-started the development in the ‘90s of Sakhawood, as the regional film industry was nicknamed, that operated outside Russia’s state system to reclaim the local storytelling traditions and dialects that Soviet rule had sought to erase. Despite its conventional and theatrically heavy-handed trappings, The Legends of Eternal Snow is an intriguing mix of anti-imperial defiance and bone-deep chill, that is made with genuine care for ethnographic detail, and a sharp and playful relish for the terrifying fireside tale.
Kiluk (Alisa Larionova, in a turn of scornful intensity), is a young woman famed far afield for her physical beauty, who is reluctantly sold into marriage to a much older chief. The pressure to eke out a living in the far east’s gruelling subzero temperatures has been weighing down in her parents, and it does not take much persuasion for her parents to accept the hefty dowry of sable furs, coins and weaponry offered to broker the deal for her hand, despite the age gap. Arranged unions are culturally sanctioned for economic pragmatism in these patriarchal parts, but while some locals joke lewdly about Kiluk’s situation, others exchange uneasy looks, affording her sympathy for her misfortune. Khabyy (Fedot Lvov), the brusque emissary sent to escort her, as she lies bundled in furs on a sledge, on the arduous journey back, is little swayed by her distraught state, but Nyukus (Gavril Menkyarov), one of his two assistant guards, is indignant and soon smitten with his charge. The purehearted young man promises that if she trusts him, he will allow her to escape.
The ghost story of Maappa only gradually emerges as a sort of tale-within-a-tale that adds a deeper layer of historical context and echoes of resonance to Kiluk’s predicament. The difficult cross-steppe journey of the laconic, bride-escorting caravan is initially related in fairly straightforward fashion, punctuated by a stop-off in a fire-warmed hunter’s cabin and the fruitless efforts of Kiluk to escape through drifts so deep the legs of the woolly horses sink far into them. But at night, unsettling dreams and trancelike behaviour start to unmoor the travellers’ sense of reality and fixed identities, as Maappa, an apparition with unfinished business and powers of bodily possession demands their attention. We gradually learn her backstory, which is based on a 1944 novella by Sakha writer Nikolai Zabolotsky that is in turn derived from Sakha folklore, and is one of being cast out from a community that has put its desperate struggle for material survival above her basic humanity. The rest of her family was struck down by a contagious disease and her neighbours, fearing she was also contaminated, ostracised and vilified her, leading to her untimely demise. Now, haunting a deserted cabin, she wants her bones to be properly and respectfully interred in the earth according to Sakha burial rites — with a surprise twist linking her intimately to one of the travelling group.
The vast and forbidding snowscapes of Siberia are a stunning backdrop to this unsettling tale of love in unsentimental conditions. Kiluk’s intricately beaded headwear and thick white furs honour the traditional Yakut identity of this place, as do the guttural chants of throat singing that form the ominous and mesmeric soundscape. With its canny (and uncanny) structure of nested stories that cross time and shifting identities, The Legends of Eternal Snow insists that the pains of history must be recalled and resolved if they are not to haunt the present, and warns that those who deprive others of the right to self-determined, authentic community will not be permitted to rest easy.
Director: Aleksei Romanov
Screenwriters: Liubov Borisova, Aleksei Romanov
Editing: Liubov Borisova
Cast: Fedot Lvov, Gavril Menkyarov, Alisa Larionova, Ivan Konstantinov
Producer: Sardana Savvina
Cinematographer: Petr Ivanov
Music: Arkadiy Ylakhov
Sound Design: Innokentii Sivtsev
Production Design: Dmitrii Mestnikov
Production company: Sakhafilm
Sales: Sakhafilm
Venue: Rotterdam Film Festival (Harbour)
In Yakut
80 minutes
