Dersou Ouzala: a Soviet-Japanese encounter
After the failure of Dodescaden and a suicide attempt, Akira Kurosawa accepts the invitation of director Sergei Guerassimov to come and shoot in the USSR. In 1971, the Japanese master chose to adapt the memoirs of Captain Vladimir Arseniev in Dersou Ouzala. Published in 1921 and 1923, these books made generations of Russians dream. Captain of the Imperial Army, Arseniev was commissioned in 1922 to map the Oussouri region, still little known at the time. There he met Dersou, a hunter who had no home and made a living selling furs. His size, dark skin and wrinkled eyes attracted the mockery of Arseniev's companions, but his knowledge of the taiga soon proved indispensable. Dersou lives in perfect harmony with the forest. Men, trees, animals... everything communicates. However, year after year, old age makes him unable to survive in the taiga. His eyesight is failing and he wounds a snow tiger without killing it: a bad sign. Arseniev invites the old man to live at home in the city. Will Dersou adapt? Akira Kurosawa avoids any sentimentality of manly friendship or a return to nature, and films Siberian nature as no one has ever done before. It also bears witness to the culture of a people scorned by the Soviet regime. In the role of Dersou Ouzala, Kurosawa imposes on the production an unknown actor, who plays his leading role. The film was critically acclaimed and received the Grand Prize at the 9th Moscow Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1976. A first adaptation of Vladimir Arseniev's Memoirs was made in 1961 by Agassi Babaïan.
Siberian camps on the big screen
In 1989, Vitali Kanevski shows us a completely different facet of Siberia with Bouge pas, meurent et ressuscite. This film with its enigmatic title is set in a Siberian camp at the end of the 1940s. Political prisoners and prisoners of war share a world of nightmares, violence and despair. It is there that Valerka grows up, a 12-year-old boy wanted by the police for having derailed a train. This young "terrorist" falls in love with Galia, a young Tatar who pulls him out of the worst situations and with whom he decides to escape from the camp to Vladivostok. With the story of these two children, it is all the inhumanity inherent in the camps that Kanevski evokes. At the release of the film, he declared about the world of the Gulag: "The system, the way of life imposes on people a single way out which is the path of lies, theft, rape, madness and monstrosities. ». For his work on Bouge pas, meurs et revessuscite, Kanevski won the Caméra d'or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, in the "Un certain regard" section. A year later, Lost in Siberia by Aleksandr Mitta (Moscow director), another film dealing with the Asian part of Russia was selected for the Directors' Fortnight and screened at the Festival
Tribute to the ethnic groups of Siberia
In 2008, French director Nicolas Vanier adapted his novel Loup sur le grand écran. Set in the Siberian mountains, the film tells us the story of Sergueï, from the nomadic clan of Batagaï, and his encounter with a she-wolf and her cubs, which will upset all its codes and all the laws of its wolf-hunting people, which Sergueï has been applying to the letter for years. The young boy and the animal learn to tame themselves in this work full of gentleness. With Loup, Vanier pays homage to the Evenes (ethnic group of the Tongouses of northern Siberia) that he met during his trip to the north of the Russian Far East a few years earlier. In 2016, Siberia is also one of the key characters in the adventure film Dans les forêts de Sibérie. Directed by French director Safy Nebbou, the film is adapted from the eponymous autobiographical story by French writer Sylvain Tesson. In search of freedom, Teddy (played by Raphaël Personnaz) goes to live in a hut not far from Lake Baikal in Siberia. On a stormy night, Teddy meets Alexel, a Russian man living in a seclusion in the Siberian forest. In the forests of Siberia is a powerful story of friendship between two men that everything opposes and yet life brings them together. Truly inspired by the sobriety of Dersou Ouzala of Kurosawa, Nebbou offers us a film of gentle simplicity, with breathtaking Siberian landscapes. The director and the writer work side by side on the script as well as on the shooting of the film: several people met by Sylvain Tesson during his trip participate in the shooting as actors. The film is awarded at the Césars in 2017, with the prize for best original music
Nature in the spotlight
The lineage of Siberian documentaries begins with Lettres de Sibérie, directed in 1957 by Frenchman Chris Marker. Staged with a certain humor, this work deals with Siberian daily life, but also with the modernity brought to a society sometimes victim of its too vast and remote territory. Years later, Nicolas Vanier returns to Siberia, this time to shoot the documentary L'Odyssée sauvage (2014). We follow his journey by dog sled, through the Saïan Mountains via the Taiga River to Lake Baikal. This work considerably raises spectators' awareness of ecology, but also of sustainable development. In 2016, Russian cinematographer and director Alexander Kuznetsov directs Manuel de libération, where we follow two young Siberian women, Yulia and Katia, transferred from their orphanage to a neuropsychiatric boarding school where they lose all forms of freedom. This documentary tells the story of their struggle to regain their rights and independence. In 2018, Christian Frei (Swiss director) and Maxim Abugaev (Russian filmmaker) are directing the sublime documentary Genesis 2.0. Set in the north-eastern islands of Russia, this film first retraces the daily life of a group of men whose main activity is to collect the tusks of woolly mammoths. It then highlights genetic research on this extinct species as well as synthetic biology, which gives researchers hope that one day they will bring the woolly mammoths back to life
