Finnish State TV Yle has been sending a number of excellent documentaries on and / or by northern indigenous people recently. You can watch them usually for three weeks longer online.

Today there will be the screening on YLE TEEMA TV of Lapsui/Lehmuskallio’s famous “Seven Songs from the Tundra”, the world’s first fiction film in Nenets language. It will also be online here.

The film Poron hahmossa pitkin taivaankaarta (In the Shape of a Reindeer Across the Canopy of Heaven, 1993), watchable online here,

is also by the famous couple Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio (see our blog entry on their visit to our team in Rovaniemi in 2012). The film tells a lot about the close relationship that people, animals, spirits and other beings in the environment of West Siberia have amongst each other.

I found especially interesting in the end how a young reindeer herder tells about the spirit-statues that travel with the nomads across the tundra and help them in various difficult situation, for example giving birth, or reindeer herd health, or predator attacks. But this is by far not the only sequence that is really worth looking.

Happy watching!