海之书（2018）

Two hunters in the Bering Strait in deepest north-east Russia. They are hunting to provide for their families and the inhabitants of their village. In the midst of the white expanse of ice they stalk the seals, circle the whales in the sea in their boats until the right moment for the harpoon has come. For the inhabitants of this icy region hunting is part of a special coexistence with nature. Not as a phrase to describe a peaceful co-existence despite everything but as an inextricable link – at least from the human point of view. The past and present of this way of life are interwoven in the ancient stories that accompany them. In “The Book of the Sea”, the filmmaker Aleksei Vakhrushev, son and cinematographic herald of the Chukchi culture, intercuts ethnographic and landscape shots of the icy expanses with animated sequences in warm earth colours which resonate with an archaic but ever-present echo of the myths of the indigenous population of far east Russia. These elements combine to produce a haunting testimony of life in the Arctic.