Gugara

On the TV screen, a man flatters himself for having given the local population the will to live: the governor of the Evenk Autonomous Area. “Reindeer are as vital to the Evenks as the car is to civilized man. He shares his life with them, gives them pet names–an incredible fact, hard to understand for a civilized man.” But the reindeer have vanished, the Evenks have left their forest tents for log houses, with TV, rock music and vodka. Young and old, men and women, die from alcohol poisoning, like Nela’s parents. Yet vodka merely destroys the outer shell of people already dead deep inside, as they have been starved of their language, religion and great pastoral migrations, and the disappearance of the reindeer has starved them of their souls. Nela is a young beauty, but widowed and depressive. She is one of the few not to drink, but the hospital crams her with psychoactive drugs. “It’s hopeless. We’ve at least learnt the Russian way of life.” The Evenks, now adrift, are slowly vanishing doubly bewildered, by the spectacle of a world so russified that they no longer recognise it, not even their festive traditions, and by vision of a grandiose natural world they have lost, amnesiac to the point of forgetting that reindeer can swim. At most, they recognize family and friends in odd scenes from the Soviet propaganda pictures of the ’60s. (Yann Lardeau)