{"id":22235,"date":"2025-08-25T13:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T13:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/22235\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T13:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T13:40:09","slug":"honeyland-director-preps-documentary-about-siberian-reindeer-hunters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/22235\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Honeyland’ Director Preps Documentary About Siberian Reindeer Hunters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTwo-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tamara Kotevska<\/a> (\u201cHoneyland\u201d), whose latest feature, \u201cThe Tale of Silyan<\/a>,\u201d premieres at the Venice Film Festival<\/a>, is readying her next project, a Siberia-lensed documentary set in the world of the indigenous Dolgan people. The director will be pitching it this week at the Venice Gap-Financing Market, which takes place Aug. 29 \u2013 31.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Mammoths That Escaped the Kingdom of Erlik Khan\u201d follows Vladik, a young reindeer hunter raised in the harsh, punishing landscape of the Yakut Tundra, who stands at a crossroads: whether to carry on the traditional ways he\u2019s inherited from his father, Roma, or to join the hunters pursuing a more modern, capitalist lifestyle by excavating and selling the buried tusks of the extinct woolly mammoth.<\/p>\n

\n\tRooted in the traditional beliefs of the Dolgan people, Roma counsels his son to heed the warnings of their ancestors, who considered it a bad omen to unearth the ancient mammoth remains buried in the Siberian permafrost. But Vladik is driven instead by the temptation of the lucrative tusk trade, setting off on a journey that will come with an uncertain cost to his family, heritage and the fragile ecosystem of the Tundra.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Mammoths That Escaped the Kingdom of Erlik Khan\u201d is produced by Lisbon-based Alecrim Vagabundo, Denmark\u2019s Real Lava, L.A.- and London-based outfit The Corner Shop, and Kotevska and Dakar\u2019s production company Ciconia Film. The producers are Enrico Saraiva, Sigrid Dyaker, Anna Hashimi, Harry Vaughn, Tamara Kotevska and Jean Dakar.<\/p>\n

\n\tPic marks the latest from the North Macedonian Kotevska, who broke out with the arresting documentary feature debut \u201cHoneyland<\/a>,\u201d co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov, which\u00a0won three awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and received two Academy Award nominations in 2020 for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature. Her solo debut, \u201cThe Walk,\u201d premiered at DOC NYC in 2023 before screening at festivals including CPH:DOX.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was during the production of that film that Kotevska met \u201cMammoths\u201d co-writer and cinematographer Jean Dakar, on the border between Syria and Turkey. \u201cThe Walk\u201d tells the story of a young Syrian refugee, Asil, who processes her trauma through a giant puppet symbolizing the millions of children displaced by war. Over the course of 18 months, Kotevska and Dakar \u2014 working as DoP \u2014 followed Asil as she and her puppet traveled across Europe, traversing several thousand miles on foot from Turkey all the way to the English Channel.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe duo developed a strong working relationship along the way and found they shared \u201cvery similar ideas about how we liked to tell stories and shoot films,\u201d according to Dakar. Their collaboration on \u201cMammoths\u201d began with photographer Jimmy Nelson\u2019s landmark book \u201cBefore They Passed Away,\u201d which introduced them to the mammoth tusk hunters of Siberia, a community clinging to its traditions despite the rapid encroachment of the modern world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Dolgan continue to survive in Siberia as reindeer herders.
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Jean Dakar\/Tamara Kotevska<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir research eventually led them to a British fixer married to a Dolgan woman from the remote Russian republic of Sakha, on the threshold of the Arctic Circle. On the filmmakers\u2019 first visit last summer, it took four full days for the duo to travel from Macedonia to Sakha, flying via Istanbul, Moscow and Yakutsk and arriving at the northernmost airport on the map \u2014 what Dakar described as \u201ca runway of dirt and shipping containers.\u201d There they traveled by single-prop plane into the heart of the Tundra, then by rubber dinghy up the frigid Anabar River until they reached the remote Dolgan village of Yurunkhaya.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom there they continued onward by quad bike, further north, finally arriving at the place where the herders lived with their reindeers in temporary settlements made up of\u00a0baloks, the Dolgan\u2019s traditional, portable log cabins that are covered in reindeer skins and built on sleds for mobility. For one month they lived among the indigenous tribe in the Yakut Tundra, eating reindeer meat and sleeping under a summer sky whose endless light Kotevska compared to being \u201con a different planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen they return at the end of November to continue shooting, \u201cthe landscape is going to completely change,\u201d said Dakar. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be white, and it\u2019s going to be very, very cold.\u201d The filmmakers have been traveling to Denmark for what Dakar described as\u00a0\u201cbasic training on how to do basic things in temperatures of -40, -50 degrees,\u201d cold so extreme that simply breaking a sweat can be life-threatening. They\u2019ll have to relearn \u201chow to walk, how to breathe,\u201d alongside the more technical questions of how to film and keep their camera equipment safe.\u00a0\u201cWe just need to rethink everything,\u201d said Dakar, though the most important survival strategy will be \u201csticking to whatever the Dolgan tell us to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMammoths\u201d pits the ancient indigenous knowledge of the Dolgan community, whose way of life has traditionally revolved around reindeer herding and fishing, against the modern forces of capitalism and the lucrative trade in mammoth tusks, with all the temptations that go along with it for a younger generation. <\/p>\n

\n\tAs divisions grow within the community, the choice that the young reindeer herder Vladik must make becomes emblematic of the larger struggle for the Dolgan to resist those modernizing forces, though Kotevska said that the film is ultimately \u201ca story of redemption.\u201d <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe filmmakers in the Yakut Tundra
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Jean Dakar\/Tamara Kotevska<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMammoths\u201d is in keeping with the themes that have preoccupied Kotevska throughout her young career, investigating the ways in which \u201cthe modern world and capitalism are modifying our lives and worlds and changing them, and destroying the knowledge that\u2019s actually necessary for our survival.\u201d It\u2019s the reason she continues to document indigenous communities struggling to preserve their old ways of life.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI find documentaries to be a legacy,\u201d Kotevska said. \u201cI love documentaries because this is the legacy, the treasure of this world that must not be forgotten. This is the archive of the world. This is what documentaries are. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor me to tell the stories of the cultures that are about to die out is a personal passion,\u201d she continued, \u201cand a personal drive to keep doing documentaries [is why I] keep doing this kind of stories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tamara Kotevska (\u201cHoneyland\u201d), whose latest feature, \u201cThe Tale of Silyan,\u201d premieres at the Venice Film…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[9985,18,117,19,17,327,19062,11492,19063],"class_list":{"0":"post-22235","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-documentaries-to-watch","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-tamara-kotevska","15":"tag-venice-film-festival","16":"tag-venice-production-bridge"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}