Land of Precarious Living: A Retrospective of 1990s Siberian Documentary Cinema

In the final stage of Soviet rule, for a few years only, it became possible to make cinema without constraint. People, cameras, and film stock were still available, the culture had not yet fallen apart, and places once inaccessible for filming opened up. While the process was common to the entire country, it unfolded differently in parts of it. Siberia had no major studios making fiction films, but there was a nearly century-long tradition of documentary filmmaking. Its heirs, directors from the East Siberian and West Siberian newsreel studios, were making their own films, breaking both the canon of the Soviet documentary hero and its precise formal style.

In the early 1990s, the old order was dying and the new was being born in pain; familiar ways of life were falling apart; hope and despair filled the vast country in equal measure. The upheaval of an era became the central theme of films from the two studios. In the 1990s, many of the reels were thrown out for lack of storage space, but copies believed lost forever were rediscovered not so long ago. On the 40th anniversary of perestroika, at yet another moment of all-encompassing realignment with unpredictable consequences, it seems important to see these films again — perhaps in a new way — and to reintroduce them into the ongoing conversation about Russian cinema. They can also be regarded as a letter from Siberia, unread and unabsorbed in the capital cities: a response to the 5th Congress of Filmmakers held in May 1986, followed by an end to the old Soviet censorship and the creation of a conflict commission to screen previously “shelved” films. Inspired by these events, the fragile Siberian wave remained obscure, left out of official chronicles and rankings. Today, its representatives are virtually unknown in Russia, though in their time they took prizes at European film festivals.

The first of the two screenings brings together little-known works by Boris Shunkov and Valery Khomenko: Obsession, an essay film about Irkutsk, trapped in its own history and disintegrating under the weight of winter, and Zhava, a portrait of a businessman from the “primitive accumulation” years, hustling between a market stall and the workshops of the local bohemia, trying to make money on everything, from trainers to painting.

The second screening is given wholly to Vladimir Eisner, a classic of Russian non-fiction cinema, whose films gather private stories into a merciless collective portrait of an era: from the religious ecstasy at the beginning of Prayer to The Last Term, whose protagonist goes from a holder of the Order of Glory to a recidivist ending his days in a retirement home.

The programme was prepared with the support of the non-profit film foundation KINORA.

Nikita Dobrynin, Aleksandr Podbornov