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The recent commercial and critical flourishing of Sakha cinema – within the Republic, across Russia, and on the global stage – has been remarkable. But no film culture emerges ex nihilo. There are always predecessors, inheritances, and vocabularies from which to build. In purely filmmaking terms, the origins of today’s “Sakhawood” lie in Soviet cinema history as well as in the early pioneers of the post-communist Republic; on a deeper cultural level, they derive from the shared visual and spiritual language of the people themselves. As their broad acclaim demonstrates, the recent wave of films have a universal appeal. But they also stand as proof of the vitality and creativity of a very particular worldview. All of this is encapsulated in Anatoly Vasiliev’s striking and (until now) rarely seen Summer House.Read More »