Many Faces of ‘the Inner Other’: The Visualization of Arctic Indigenous People in Recent Russian Cinema

Abstract

There is an apparent trend that indigenous peoples living in Russian Arctic have recently been visualized in both Russian documentary and feature films. In 2014, especially, four ‘Arctic films’ have been released at once in Russia: Andrei Zaviagintsev’s Leviathan, Natal’ia Meshchaninova’s ‘Hope’ Factory, Aleksandr Mel’nik’s Territory and Vladimir Tumaev’s White Moss. The first three films, among others, have been thoroughly analyzed and highly admired through various themes and motifs both in Russia and in other countries. On the contrary, there has been little research to date on the film White Moss which for the first time in Russian film history visualizes a story of Nenets people living in Yamal region above the Arctic Circle. For this reason, in the article I will attempt to analyze in detail how indigenous people dwelling in the Arctic have been visualized in Russian film history and what are currently the most important issues in the life of Nenets people, one of the ‘Inner Others’ of Russia, as reflected in the film White Moss.