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Seitsemän laulua tundralta | Seven Songs from the Tundra by Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio
FIN 2000, Forum
Like a ballad "Seitsemän laulua tundralta", stretching over seven songs, tells about the life of the Nenets, a nomad people in northern Russia. During Soviet times harassment and the pressure to assimilate increasingly took over their everyday life. After teaming up to film a series of documentaries on the life of the Nenets people in the 1990s, Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui came up with the idea of making a feature film that "would be more expressive, multi-faceted and free". Anastasia Lapsui, herself a Nenet by birth, wrote the script in which she recreates the legends and her own experiences, and the film was made with amateur actors. "Seitsemän laulua tundralta" is the first feature film to be made in the Nenets language.