5^th RUSSIAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL FILM FESTIVAL

and

NORTHERN TRAVELLING FILM FESTIVAL 

Salekhard, September 14-20 

There were 26 films selected for competition on the 5^th RAFF; those included works by “alive classics” of documentaries (Anatoly Baluev, Vladimir Gerchikov, Arkady Morozov, Alexei Pogrebnoi, Marina Razbezhkina, Valery Solomin, Mairam Yusupova) and audacious pictures by young film directors. Together they have created impressive panorama of anthropological cinema and current dialogue of Russian cultures. Though classic style prevailed in general, the Jury led by film director Karen Gevorkyan gave the Grand Prix to new film “Yaptik–Haesse” by Edgar Bartenev; this movie has set to the whole festival an ambience of film-music and ethno-art. Another source of special 5^th RAFF’s atmosphere was Alexei Fedorchenko's feature “Shosho”; this film opened the festival and gave ground to endless debates about eternal youth of old mythology, anthropological film-truth and director’s right for ethnic humor. A series of films (Ivan Golovnev’s “Crossroads”, Rodion Antakov’s “Father Sen-Sei”, Vladimir Golovnev’s “The Boat Goes and the Bank Stays” by) shone up an anxious theme of today’s religion-building. All in all the 5^th RAFF became an experimental platform for searching new film-forms, for expression not only nostalgia about leaving cultural values, but also for co-participation in today’s cultural activity and identification.

Northern Travelling Film Festival that was held in parallel to RAFF has presented the program of the Russian and foreign various genre films about the North under the main title “Arctic Panorama” (“Film-faces of the Arctic Eight”). It coincided that in autumn 2006 Salekhard has acted as a residence not only for anthropological films, but also for the Arctic Council, and some diplomats of northern countries became active and emotional participants of the festival. “Arctic panorama” represented the masterpieces of modern features of Iceland (the nominee on Oscar-2005 “The Last Farm” by Runar Runarsson), Sweden (“As in the Heaven” by Cay Pollak), Finland (“Elina” by Klaus Haro); in programme there were also Peter Raymont's outstanding documentary “Arctic Dreamer. The Lonely Quest of Viljhalmur Stefansson” (Canada), “Armwrestler from Solitude” by Lisa Mounte and Helen Alson (Sweden), witty Russian animation including “About Crawfishes” by Valentine Olshvang (Yekaterinburg) and “How Nyanchedo Myniku Taught Man to Fly” by Ivan Eliseev (Yekaterinburg) and Mikhail Korobov (Salekhard).

Within the united festival “Salekhard-2006” was a room for international round-table “Northward of 60^th Parallel: Models of Social, Economic and Cultural Development in Canada and Russia.” Every night The Club of Night Anthropologist boiled with passions and ideas; under its aegis some old and new films by Sergei Litovets, Edgar Bartenev and other directors have been screened; Mikhail Gorshkov, Vladimir Klyaus and Yuri Sheikin have presented the program “Russia’s Folk Music Traditions in Ethnographic Film” with fragments of films, animations, live sound in the mode of “dialogues” of musical instruments of various peoples.