MOSCOW, August 22. /TASS Correspondent Dmitry Osipov/. Screenwriter, director and producer from St. Petersburg Mila Kudryashova has been making films about the Arctic for five years now. Her first documentary was about the search for polar dinosaurs. Mila got overwhelmed with the topic, and Yakutia eventually became her main focus. Further works were The Potapov@doc, The Female Voice of the Arctic. The film, on which she is working now, is devoted to formation of the Yakut theater of the 21st century. Here is a story about why the director has got so interested in Yakutia, about the love for local culture and about her inspiration roots.
Tales of the North
As for the interest in the Arctic region, there is no any "crazy cataclysm" there, she said. "St. Petersburg is quite a northern city, and it's home to Arctic research centers. Though I was born in St. Petersburg, I was raised by my grandmother Galina (Agrippina) Sorokina, who had come from Tours (the Krasnoyarsk Region - TASS) to bring me up," Mila said. "I've gained a lot from her upbringing, from endless stories about the North, from Northern legends and stories about the Evenks. Grandma was a great storyteller, and I was a grateful listener."
Guests from the North were often. They brought to St. Petersburg toys of deer skin, photos of hunting, of the taiga, of endless forests, and also treats of fish and venison. "So I've known about the North since childhood," she continued.
Mila connects her ancestry with Siberia and the North. "My grandma's mother was Khakas, and her father was Chaldon, an indigenous Russian ethnic group in Siberia. My family hasn't escaped the dekulakization (Soviet time's campaign against kulaks - prosperous peasants and farmers), because they had a strong household," the director said.
Mila's grandmother was born in the Krasnoyarsk Region's village of Krutoy, but between 1939 and 1975 she lived in Evenkia, where she had been sent to work as a paramedic. The grandmother's story explains the interest in the project dubbed The Female Voice of the Arctic. "Of course, it's a personal project, it is dedicated to my grandmother, who devoted the life to helping and treating nomadic peoples," Mila said.
Changing Cannes for 'different places'
Having graduated from secondary school, Mila faced a difficult choice between philology and journalism at the St. Petersburg State University. The second attempt was successful - she started studying journalism. "In our humanitarian class we all were very ambitious and were choosing most difficult routes," she explained.
While a student, Mila came to work in the cinema. On the very first project, she touched upon a legend - The Peculiarities of National Fishing: in 1998, she made a film about the film.
"This genre did not exist as such, and we were to produce something that would remain in our memories. The film was good, and the team was great. That's how I stayed with filmmaking," Mila told us.
Further on, she combined work in journalism and films, wrote for newspapers. Being on sets was a routine. She used to work for the TNT television channel.
Thanks to working with a production company, she participated in major international festivals in Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. "At a certain stage, I realized that right, the huge projects I'm involved in are very interesting, but anyway I'm in the production group, and we, well, are working for someone else - someone neither good or bad. That someone is just someone. Once this was realized, I changed tours to Cannes and Berlin for trips to different places."
The first place of the kind was the Perm Region, where on the Kama River they made the Okhan Elephant docu about a paleontological expedition. "Dinosaurs appeared because I wanted to understand who Spielberg's characters were, what would happen to them if they lived in Russia and were looking for dinosaurs," Mila said.
Pavel Skuchas, a paleontologist from the St. Petersburg University, was a guide to the world of dinosaurs in Yakutia. The film is about a group of scientists involved in excavations on the Teete creek in Yakutia's Suntarsky District. The scientists have found remains of a stegosaurus and teeth of a giant herbivorous sauropod, a northernmost find it was.
A refugium is the biggest discovery of those paleontologists. It is a natural reserve of animals that have already died out in other regions of the world and continued to live in the territory of modern Yakutia.
Project after project
Back then, Mila was denied a trip to that remote taiga area - she could've failed to withstand those very difficult conditions (the inaccessible area was some 100 km from the village of Horo in the Suntarsky District, to where people could get exclusively on horseback or by all-terrain vehicles). Only her cameraman Ivan Semenov managed to go there. She took time to study myths of Yakut dragons, noting their resemblance with dinosaurs. Arts Manager Lena Vasilyeva, an expert in ancient epics and modern myths as well as in traditional Yakut legends about ancient monsters, was the film's curator. She was the film's one of main characters.
"Through her vision, we were discovering the world of the Yakut epic Olonkho. That was my first approach to the epic, to mythology, to creatures, images. The film was not just popular science, its genre was creative documentary, because we've used works of artists."
Every project generates another project, meeting people leads to some completely hidden topics that you want to express, Mila explained. She met Yakut avant-garde director Sergey Potapov and then appeared The Potapov@doc film. Sergey Potapov introduced Mila to ethno-singer Valentina Romanova-Chyskyyrai. The director shot Chyskyyrai film about her. "If I hadn't met Valentina, she wouldn't have written music for The Female Voice of the Arctic and there wouldn't have been a 90-minute trip with her into the musical 'space'," she said.
Now that she is 49, the director has been striving for more significant, universal topics. For example, The Brain. Tradition. The Dream film unites several characters. The Bootura Theater project has emerged from the childish interest in the backstage world. It is about the formation of the Yakut theater of the 21st century, which is based on tradition and which develops with latest technologies and ideas. The director and producer has been working on The Cycle film - about Osuohai, the Yakut circular dance.
Mila has been producing films both in Yakutia and outside the region. For example, The Female Voice of the Arctic was made in the Krasnoyarsk, Leningrad Regions and even in Oxford. The Nomadic Museum is a film about a group of Yakut museum specialists who go to St. Petersburg thinking how they will be accepted, what to present, and about what comes of it. The film about Chyskyyrai was shot in Yakutia, Arkhangelsk and Kazakhstan. "All my projects are inter-regional, but they are connected with the Yakut culture, Yakut characters, and this gives the impression I am staying in Yakutia all the time," she smiled.
Another important aspect is that the films are made in the Yakut language. "We'll translate later on what they are saying. The main thing is the characters must behave naturally. If there is any information that I need to highlight, to focus, then, of course, the cameraman, the sound engineer, the creative producer would tell me," she said.
Never stop dreaming
"I have seen many foreign films about St. Petersburg - about the places where I live, where I was born. And I can see they somehow present everything in a different way. For example, a Dutch author showed the story of a family through a box with old shoes, which they kept in the attic of a dacha house. I would not have thought of that, because I also have such a box at my dacha. This is what I know, what I'm used to. Thus I can't see it so," the director said.
This is likewise the other way round. "In Yakutia, I can see something unlike my world, I can see it more sharply - differently configured optics. On the other hand, any talented Yakut documentary filmmaker will make a film about St. Petersburg to make me gasp, because he will be able to see places and locations with a sharp eye," she said.
Mila's studio is called See the Sea. "I love the sea, I'm a marine. I can lie there, watch, count, the thing is - it should be there. I like to sail, on ships, on yachts, on old ships. With a Finnish team I've sailed Botany Bay, was a member of the community for preservation of maritime traditions in Finland," Mila said.
"I wish I were not exhausted after projects, so that everything could happen "for the first time and again." After every project rest, different topics, the sea are a must. I wish I could remain passionate, not to get used to things. My main dream is to continue dreaming, without calming down. This, by the way, is what my film My Personal Dragon is about. It is not about dragons or dinosaurs, it's about that internal engine that wouldn't let us calm down and which incites new dreams," the director said in conclusion.