Arctic Art House: Russian Region Nurtures Local Film Boom

Yakutsk, Russia, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Jan, 2019 ) :In Russia's remote Yakutia region the film industry is booming, despite shooting schedules being restricted by some of the coldest winters on Earth and directors blaming "spirits" for disturbing the production crew.

Six time zones away from the country's film schools and without central state funding for its filmmakers, the region nonetheless produces half of all Russian movies made outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

"Everybody wants to make movies," said Alexei Romanov, who turned his back on a promising career as a filmmaker in Saint Petersburg three decades ago to return to his native Siberia.

"We have films with miniscule budgets and hilariously small fees but they make more in the cinemas here than Hollywood blockbusters," he said.

When the director came back to Yakutia, a vast territory that is home to fewer than a million people, the local industry consisted of just two cameramen.

Now, thanks in part to his efforts, people are "fighting for cameras" to finish their projects before equipment starts failing in winter temperatures that regularly drop to minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit).

Romanov estimated an average local movie budget to be between $40,000 and $80,000 (35,000 and 70,000 Euros).

Most actors basically work for free on skeleton budgets, hoping to eventually get paid from box office revenues.

But domestic and foreign audiences are starting to notice the region's output.

Last year, a Yakutian film "The Lord Eagle" about an elderly couple living with an eagle in the forest, received the top prize at the Moscow Film Festival.

South Korea's Busan Film Festival, one of the most important in Asia, in 2017 showed a dozen Yakutia productions in a special retrospective, praising their unique cinematic style.