Seitsemän laulua tundralta

Fit for nothing tonight, so watched another Siberian tundra film, as you do. I mean, how obscure is this: a 1999 B&W film by a female Finnish director about the Nenet people who live between the Kora and Kamyr peninsulas in Arctic Russia... and yet, there was a DVD of it in our local supermarket, in French. Aside from herding reindeer, the Nenets are big on singing and storytelling (they didn't have a writing system until the 1930s) and the film focuses on this part of their culture in an awkward acting-cum-documentary style. They lead a tough life and I must say didn't look as chirpy as the Happy People in Herzog's Taiga film (see last Thursday's post). It must have been a fairly easy choice to shoot in B&W - there's no colour at all in the bleak-but-beautiful lansdscape. Apparently the film was Finland's submission to the 2000 Oscars, in the Best Foreign Film category, but didn't even get nominated.