Original in Russian, 1997. Runtime 47 minutes - in English.
The filmmaker traces events of his own travel in 1996 to the famous Yamal sanctuary, The Seven Tents, at the northern tip of the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia. The film depicts Nenets nomadic reindeer herders' lives, myths, and rituals. Playing by chance a role of pilgrim, the ethnographer encountered many extraordinary and esoteric things. The figure of the patron-spirit "mistress of the tent", image of the Goddess of Yamal, people (including the author) and reindeer participating in sacrifices and purifications - all of these happened along one and the same road, the sacred path to the Seven Tents. Historically, that was the way by which the Nenets' ancestors came to the northern coastal tundra called Yamal (End of the Land).
Winner of the First Annual Russian Anthropological Film Festival, Salekhard, Russia, 1998; Original in Russian, 1997. (47 minutes - in English)
Dr. Andrei Golovnev is a well-known Arctic anthropologist and filmmaker and a leading expert on indigenous peoples and cultures of the Russian North. He is a Senior Anthropologist at the Institute of History and Archeology in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and founder and director of the Ethnographic Bureau, also headquartered in Ekaterinburg. He has led numerous anthropological and archeological expeditions in the Russian North, particularly studying peoples who depend on large-scale reindeer herding.
