MOSCOW, September, 20. /TASS Correspondent Vera Kostamo/. Leonid Kruglov has participated in an expedition and cultural project, dubbed Russia’s Main Facade. History, Events, People (joint Arctic expeditions of the Russian Geographical Society, the Defense Ministry and the Northern Fleet). Leonid is a film director, ethnographer, traveler and organizer and participant in dozens expeditions to the planet’s most hard-to-reach places. His idea was to shoot opening views for a documentary, with a working title NovayaZemlya_doc. Right now, he continues the production in another expedition - to the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago.
Novaya Zemlya: The Creation
The Novaya Zemlya’s production continues for five years: those are the years of seven expeditions and more than 400 hours of produced material. Here, to the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago, Leonid has come for a top important reason - to shoot the opening views.
- The film’s idea has emerged from my previous project - The Great North Way. Back then, we repeated the route of Kossak Semen Dezhnev, when our team covered 10,000 kilometers across the Russian Arctic. Dezhnev’s expedition continued for almost 15 years, and we’ve managed within five. At that time, I used to work a lot in archives, and studied what the explorers had written in diaries. I’ve noticed: they kept writing that when moving from the west to the east they could see some land in the north: in the Barents Sea and further on. They used to call those territories Novaya Zemlya (New Land),- Leonid said.
Not many people, apart from focused specialists, are aware of what happens there, on those "new lands." Those lands turned out to be the Novaya Zemlya, the Franz Josef Land (FJL), the Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, the Izvestiya TSIK Islands, archipelagoes near the Taimyr Peninsula, the Vize Island, the Wrangel Island.
- We know only little both about the expeditions of those explorers, and about modern expeditions. The Novaya Zemlya project’s idea is to tell the audience about all the explorations, about the people, the nature of the high-latitude Arctic, - he continued.
- On FJL we studied the camps of first explorers and saw barrels, in which we found tea and coffee in good conditions. I took ashore a handful of coffee beans. They thawed, and we could feeel the aroma. We dried the beans and made coffee. The drink did have a taste. Amazing: more than a hundred years have passed, and here you are drinking the coffee, which had been brought to FJL decades earlier. I believe such opportunities are possible in the Arctic only.
The Novaya Zemlya’s production is highly time-consuming, as every archipelago requires a separate expedition or - another option is that the team joins some other expedition.
- We’ve organized a few expeditions with the Northern Fleet, with the Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Academy of Sciences. After this trip, we’ll have our own expedition to shoot the missing material on the Severnaya Zemlya. It is the place of the recent great geographical discovery (he means Boris Vilkitsky’s hydrographic expedition in the Arctic Ocean onboard the Taimyr and the Vaygach, when the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago was discovered - TASS). Next year we’ll try to finalize this topic of the Sannikov Land (a phantom island in the Arctic Ocean. Its supposed existence became something of a myth in 19th-century Russia).
To unite the isolated
Rare Arctic unicorns — narwhals, artifacts from the time of Ivan the Terrible, the discovery of islands, changing places and faces — over recent five years each expedition has brought more and more material for the project. At a certain moment Leonid feared bringing together all those isolated stories could become problematic.
The solution came with a call from Fyodor Konyukhov. The traveler was plotting an expedition to the North Pole and was planning to spend two weeks there - doing scientific job and painting.
- I’ve suggested Fyodor took cameras and asked him to record a diary. Additionally the arrangement was he would paint the main images of the Arctic. So that later on every image could open a new novella in the movie, - Leonid said. - When I received and then listened to the materials, I was shocked, I couldn’t stop tears. Fyodor has recorded such emotional diaries. I’ve used them as the movie’s outline. Its central line.
Twice Leonid had been denied the permission to film in the Matochkin Shar. This time, the third attempt, was successful.
- It’s so important: we’ve received the permission, and the copter’s cameraman Gleb Purikhov, risking in rain and storm, has filmed amazing views. They will open the movie. In my understanding, those views show how it all was in time of Creation: the fogs, through which slowly appear swamps and mountain peaks, the running brooks, the thawing ice. That’s what it is like - terra incognita.
Every trip to the high latitudes is unpredictable. A wind may begin from nowhere, a fog may instantly cover everything around, or the team would need emergency evacuation because of a curious bear wandering nearby. In such locations, cameramen always risk the equipment.
- We were taking the last images in the Matochkin Shar with the last charged battery. Imagine, we see a beautiful snow view, which we couldn’t miss. I flew up to it from around a hill, for that in had to go as high as 500 meters (a maximum height for a drone) - to see how a cloud is crawling onto the scene. The air flow caught the coper, lifted it to another few dozen meters. Luckily, I managed to stabilize it and have it back with all the material, - cameraman Gleb Purikhov said.
Starving bear and angry walrus
Work in the Arctic is always a risk. Wild animals, ice water, unpredictable weather and numerous challenges. The expedition to the Franz Josef Land Archipelago was in a boat sailing to the shore. All of a sudden a walrus cow attacked the boat.
- We were about a couple kilometers from the shore. We sail through the ice and all of a sudden feel a bump into the bottom. As if we have collided with an ice floe. We stop the engine. I was sitting in the back and saw a ‘torpedo’ rushing into us. This is how I felt it. Something black, slick, and rushing, - Leonid continued.
The walrus cow jumped out of the water like a bobber beating the boat every time. She hits the boat, and one of the balloons loses air. Luckily, the group’s boat had a few sections. The bottom was deflating. Somebody was trying to repel the animal with a gaff. Then, a guard remembered he had noticed a calf on a floating ice floe. Its mom must have been feeding in the water and having seeing the boat decided to attack it fearing the boat could threaten the baby. The group eventually managed to start the engine and get to the shore.
- Once, we’ve explored the Alexandra Land’s Kupol Lunny (the highest point). There, the group led by (Valerian) Albanov (who drifted on the St. Anna in 1912-1914), went ashore and crossed it. When we came there, the bird rookery was empty. The bear, which had fed there for a long time, was starving, skinny and aggressive. Nothing could stop it. We were lucky to see an old Soviet plane nearby, and, like in a Hollywood movie, we climbed onto its wing. The bear was walking towards us, closer and closer. We had to shoot a rubber bullet. The situation was tense.
By the Vise Island, Leonid’s group faced the most extreme situation of all the expeditions. The storm was pushing the boat onto the rocky shore.
- The boat was swinging on the rocks, we feared it would break into pieces. I shot an interesting episode that I will definitely include into the film. With God’s help, we managed to approach the shore safely.
Meeting bears happened on all the archipelagos and islands. During our expedition to the Yuzhny Island, at the Litke trading post, we had to shelter from a bear on the roof of a house.
- If nature is eyed as a fortress, then the Arctic is its last outpost. And it’s incredible when you shoot a group of narwhals and they don't leave fearing humans, but - on the contrary - they are staring with curiosity. A female with a cub pops up higher, and you can see on the video that they are staring (correct, through the copter), but anyway - right into your eyes, - Leonid said.
Leonid and the project cameramen have managed to shoot incredible images. Those are a few hundreds of belugas, and a walrus rookery with already thousands of animals, and bears with cubs.
Throughout the expedition, we are surrounded by water. Its color and mood, salinity and temperature keep changing. Water makes noises, splashes, resists, washes, destroys, gives life — here, in the center of nature, the fuss retreats, and information noises become nothing. Over the expedition, the sea makes us practice patience - all landings and work depend on its conditions.
- The Arctic is the cleanest and best preserved region in the world. It is practically clean from plastics. We can see healthy bears and other animals and we see how well they live here. I hope the film we are making is a contribution to the preservation of the Arctic, - Leonid Kruglov said in conclusion.