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. Read more