Schaslivyia liudzi

To see them working from dawn until dusk, in the stable, the fields, the vegetable garden or kitchen, one cannot help thinking that Yuri and Tamara Bajkous are carrying on their shoulders the burden of an ancestral and harrowing rurality. Yet in 1989, they made the decision to leave Saint Petersburg to settle in a cabin in a remote corner of the Belarussian forest. What was to be a temporary shelter until their farm was built became their home, for lack of State assistance. Victor Asliuk’s camera, which knows just when to take root, films chores and days as they seamlessly follow on (“I’ve brought the ducks in. – Well done! Boil up some barley. Tomorrow we’ll pick the tomatoes…”) as if weathered by the twenty-five years spanning the couple’s arrival and their current quotidian (the aches of old age that make harvesting difficult). In a handful of shots, the four elements appear with a generic force that surpasses circumstance, while the chronicle becomes a sort of picture book in which there is no hint of caricature. Or takes on a mythical dimension: between Noah’s ark (each animal has a name) and a paradise from which Adam and Eve were never banished. To the point that when the couple crosses the river to go and sell a sheep, the filmmaker chooses not to follow them. We wonder whether he might still be there. (Charlotte Garson)