YAKUTSK, January 20. /ITAR-TASS/. Amid the bad 40-degree freeze in the Russian Siberian region of Yakutia, a production team of the Tokyo TBS Vision production house has shot a UNESCO-commissioned documentary about the Lena Columns featuring on the organization’s World Heritage List.
According to Yakutia’s Ministry of Nature Protection, a Japanese camera crew earlier visited the place last summer. After the just-ended filming session the authors can now present “a wide palette” of the columns’ beauty in summer and in winter.
“We were to visit this UNESCO World Heritage site in winter’s 40-degree cold in order to have the full impression,” said TBS Vision Director Haruki Enatsu, adding that getting to the Lena Columns in winter was a thrilling experience.
From the tourist base Batamay located in front of the park the team set off for the location on snowmobiles, which was, Enatsu said, “an unforgettable feeling.” It took the filmmakers over 1.5 hours to go up to the viewing platform at an altitude of two kilometers. The beauty of the landscape they saw from there was really worth “this trial by frost.”
“Now we are happy to have experienced the extreme freeze of Yakutia,” Enatsu said.
Japan’s TBS Vision treats its audience to weekly thirty-minute travelogue films about UNESCO World Heritage sites. The film called The World Heritage Lena Columns Nature Park will go on air in February.
The Lena Columns is a geological formation and a similarly named natural park in Russia on the Lena River. The so-called columns are in fact column-like cliffs up to 100 meters high stretching over many kilometers in a bizarre mass along the riverbanks. Scientists believe this whimsical terrain took its present shape around 400,000 years ago.