Svetlana Romanova

Daniela, Svetlana, and Matti film their relationship to the Arctic. The concern for the future of an unborn child, longing for home and a traditional way of life in the world of possibilities provided by capitalism form the foundation of the film. Arctic Utopias probes the individual’s emotional spectrum in a rapidly changing environment.

Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle traverse grassy meadows, birch forests, and snowy taiga through rural stretches of the Central Yakutian Lowlands, a transition zone between Central and Eastern Siberia. While following the tidal direction of the Lena River, which flows north to the Arctic Ocean, elements begin to emerge: familial memories, encounters with animals, the richness of the region’s natural resources, and the realities of their violent extraction.

The making of histories, myths and mining archives for memories in the age of epistemicide can be understood as an act of resistance. Our globalized constant, hyper-capitalist culture, releases tremors that shake, uproot and degrade our oldest and most sacred truths. Some of the seperversions feel apocalyptic coming in sudden seismic bursts, others go unnoticed slowly slipping away.

Svetlana Romanova’s Managa Bar/Rustam’s Habitat brilliantly portrays contemporary youth culture in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic and the coldest city in the world. Divided in half like the two sides of a record, the film immerses viewers in the daily happenings of the filmmaker’s life, depicting her social circle of Yakutian artists, punks, and community inhabitants.

Shot in and around Yakutsk, in a remote region of Siberia, this film wrestles with the complex realities of a people and place facing continual, rapid transformation under Russia’s drive for resource extraction.

Constructed out of personal notes, both verbal and visual, Voyage of Jeanette is an essay film that poses questions about the intersection between image production and the creation of narratives, which shape our perception of contemporaneity and manifest in our performances of history, heritage, and memory. Positioned in the Yakutian Arctic, the film invites the viewer to ask vital questions about the meaning of peripheries and how western ontologies of discovery and the writing of history are absorbed into or contrast with immediate Yakutian realities.

Daniela, Svetlana, and Matti film their relationship to the Arctic. The concern for the future of an unborn child, longing for home and a traditional way of life in the world of possibilities provided by capitalism form the foundation of the film. Arctic Utopias probes the individual’s emotional spectrum in a rapidly changing environment.

Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle traverse grassy meadows, birch forests, and snowy taiga through rural stretches of the Central Yakutian Lowlands, a transition zone between Central and Eastern Siberia. While following the tidal direction of the Lena River, which flows north to the Arctic Ocean, elements begin to emerge: familial memories, encounters with animals, the richness of the region’s natural resources, and the realities of their violent extraction.

The making of histories, myths and mining archives for memories in the age of epistemicide can be understood as an act of resistance. Our globalized constant, hyper-capitalist culture, releases tremors that shake, uproot and degrade our oldest and most sacred truths. Some of the seperversions feel apocalyptic coming in sudden seismic bursts, others go unnoticed slowly slipping away.

Svetlana Romanova’s Managa Bar/Rustam’s Habitat brilliantly portrays contemporary youth culture in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic and the coldest city in the world. Divided in half like the two sides of a record, the film immerses viewers in the daily happenings of the filmmaker’s life, depicting her social circle of Yakutian artists, punks, and community inhabitants.

Shot in and around Yakutsk, in a remote region of Siberia, this film wrestles with the complex realities of a people and place facing continual, rapid transformation under Russia’s drive for resource extraction.

Constructed out of personal notes, both verbal and visual, Voyage of Jeanette is an essay film that poses questions about the intersection between image production and the creation of narratives, which shape our perception of contemporaneity and manifest in our performances of history, heritage, and memory. Positioned in the Yakutian Arctic, the film invites the viewer to ask vital questions about the meaning of peripheries and how western ontologies of discovery and the writing of history are absorbed into or contrast with immediate Yakutian realities.