Maappa and The Ungovernable Female Protagonists of Sakha Cinema

Author

Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, Natalya Khokholova

Abstract

The Sakha Republic, which has produced its own films for more than thirty years, has recently gained the attention of scholars of Russian and Eurasian cinemas globally (Damiens 2014, 2015; Strukov 2018; Romanova 2022; McGinity-Peebles 2022). Frequently, scholarship has highlighted the role of Sakha cinema in consolidating and promoting Sakha identities, histories, and culture against the historical context of imperial Russian and Soviet colonial oppression. However, little attention has been paid to the representation of female protagonists in Sakha cinema and their important role in Sakha identity building. This article seeks to fill this important scholarly lacuna, focusing on the figure of the ‘ungovernable’ female protagonist in Sakha cinema in four important examples: Maappa (Aleksei Romanov, 1986), Moi ubiitsa / My Killer (Kostas Marsan, 2016), Pugalo / Scarecrow (Dmitrii Davydov, 2020), and Ichchi / Spirit of Itchi (Kostas Marsan, 2020). In all four films, the female protagonists are viewed as horrifying and grotesque by their communities and are vilified as such. These Sakha figures of the “monstrous-feminine” (Creed 1993) seek vengeance as monsters or spectral entities, visually representing mother nature, which is likewise unruly. Although this coding of the female protagonist as a formidable force of nature is not exclusive to Sakha cinema, it is in fact a fundamental notion within Sakha culture. For example, all water bodies are considered ‘grandmother’ (ebe) and are respected and revered as such by the Sakha people. Overarchingly, our analysis shows that these female protagonists defy integration within the russified Sakha society and are therefore fundamental to the films’ agenda of championing Sakha culture. We argue, therefore, that these ‘ungovernable’ female protagonists function as a site of Sakha resistance in the face of colonial oppression. Furthermore, the ‘ungovernable female’ archetype has important implications beyond just Sakha cinema, and gestures to a cinematic resistance against colonial (and patriarchal) oppression globally.

Keywords

Sakha cinema, Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous cinema, womanhood, post-Soviet Russia, decolonisation.

Introduction

Sakha cinema has begun to attract wider scholarship in recent years, with publications focusing on its history (Damiens 2015), genres (Damiens 2014; Ivanilova and Majumdar 2023), local-global relations (Strukov 2018), cultural artefacts (Mészáros 2022; Romanova 2022), and post-coloniality (McGinity-Peebles 2022). However, scholarly works are yet to examine the ungovernable female protagonist – an important figure in Sakha cinema. In this article, we argue that this stalwart figure who refuses to conform or be subjugated to colonial systems of power functions as a repository of Sakha identity long repressed under successive Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian regimes.¹ Crucially, she challenges centuries-old Russian and Soviet cultural and political hegemony in Sakha (Yakutia), despite often facing rejection from her own Sakha community.² Her presence is as old as Sakha cinema itself: she is the subject of the first Sakha-language film ever made – Maappa (1986) – which, as Sibiryakova (2022) states, “was the first attempt to reconstruct Sakha identity through film”. Maappa (discussed at length later in this article) revealed both the yearning for, and the ability of, cinema to promote long repressed Sakha cultural values and identity.

The link between Sakha cinema and Sakha identity was institutionalised in 1992 through the establishment of the Republic’s first state-owned studio, Sakhafilm. In his inaugural speech, Stepan Sivtsev-Dollu, head of Sakhafilm, declared the need “to emphasise the role of cinema in the spiritual revival of the people of the Sakha Republic” (Savvina 2017). Since then, cinema has been tasked with the consolidation and promotion of the Sakha language, identity, customs, history, and folklore. Of the ethnic republics in the Russian Federation that produce their own films, Sakha cinema is the most diverse in terms of genre and prolific in terms of the number of films produced.³ The Sakha film industry experienced a domestic boom in the 2000s (Savvina 2017) and by 2011, up to fifteen films per year were produced in the Republic, equivalent to the average yearly film output of Kazakhstan (McGinity-Peebles 2022). Consequently, the Sakha film industry gained the affectionate moniker ‘Sakhawood’ among its local population. This is especially noteworthy when one recalls that films have been shot on a shoestring budget of approximately one million roubles (£15,000)—which is comprised of a mix of private funds and stipends from the Republic—and the filmmakers and crews are a mix of professionally and non-professionally trained. Sakha films are generally made in the Sakha language with Russian subtitles added, which subverts the hegemony of the Russian language: less than half the population speak Sakha as their first language and UNESCO has deemed the language to be “vulnerable” (McGinity-Peebles 2022).

From 2016 onwards, Sakha cinema began to make a name for itself among national and international film festivals and critics. Films such as Ego dochʹ / His Daughter (Tatʹiana Everstova, Russian Federation, 2016), Koster na vetru / The Bonfire (Dmitrii Davydov, Russian Federation, 2016), and 24 snega / 24 Snow (Mikhail Barynin, Russian Federation, 2016), were shown at national and international film festivals celebrating Indigenous, Arctic, Asian, and Russian cinema. Meanwhile, in 2017, the Busan International Film Festival in Korea hosted a Sakha film showcase titled “Sakha Cinema: World of Magical Nature and Myth” comprising seven features and five shorts spanning three decades of Sakha filmmaking (McGinity-Peebles 2022). Sakha cinema’s ascent onto the national and global stage continued with Dmitrii Davydov’s Pugalo / Scarecrow (Russian Federation, 2020) winning the Grand Prize at Kinotavr Film Festival (Russia’s biggest film festival) as well as planned collaborations via the Arctic Indigenous Film Fund (AIFF), established in 2018.

The Sakha films that have performed particularly well on the global stage use lavish cinematography associated with the global art house genre and stories rooted in Sakha cultural and historical particularity. As we discuss, the deliberate aesthetic links fashioned between the local and the global in later Sakha cinema also subvert the ongoing Russian cultural hegemony within the Republic. Nonetheless, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has had various repercussions on Sakha filmmaking. The Sakha participation in international collaborations and cross-cultural initiatives such as the Arctic Indigenous Film Fund have halted. The war has also affected the scope and subjects of Sakha filmmaking. While Sakha cinema has since its inception addressed imperial Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet oppression implicitly, the first Sakha film to address historic Russian colonialism directly, Nuuchcha / The Russian (Russian Federation, 2021), has to date never been allowed to be screened in Russia, the war representing the final nail in the coffin of a film that was mired in controversy even prior to February 2022.⁴

The war in Ukraine has placed the question of decolonisation at the forefront of Russophone cultural studies and this journal’s Special Issue on decolonisation in post-Soviet cinema is crucial to these debates. Our article makes an important contribution to this Issue: the films discussed here, like Sakha cinema itself, are decolonising entities, reclaiming Sakha cultural identity and history after centuries of Imperial Russian, Soviet, and indeed, post-Soviet Russian oppression. Furthermore, this article is a collaborative effort of two authors of Sakha and non-Sakha heritage. We bring local, national and global perspectives to our analysis of Sakha cinema, contributing to the decolonising of Russophone/Post-Soviet film scholarship, which is still dominated by Russian and Western voices.

This article investigates the decolonial attributes embodied in the female protagonists in four films – Maappa (Aleksei Romanov, Soviet Union, 1986), Moi ubiitsa / My Killer (Kostas Marsan, Russian Federation, 2016), Pugalo / Scarecrow (Dmitrii Davydov, Russian Federation, 2020), and Ichchi / Spirit of Itchi (Kostas Marsan, Russian Federation, 2020). Each of these films is significant for how it contributes to the discourse of Sakha culture and the historical and present-day relationship to the (former) imperial centre. Maappa, as discussed, heralded the role of cinema in reviving Sakha cultural heritage after particularly stringent oppression in the Soviet era. My Killer was made after a distinctly colonialist federal law was passed in 2016 allowing Russian citizens to be granted plots of land in the Far East (Fondahl et al. 2019: 2-4). The film’s portrayals of a vengeful nature against the post-Soviet capitalist social order thus represent a unique challenge to the political and environmental status quo. The national and international success of Scarecrow truly put Sakha cinema on the map: its celebration of Sakha mysticism and nature entwined with lavish cinematography renders it the case study par excellence of the recent strategy in promoting Sakha culture locally, nationally, and globally. Meanwhile, Spirit of Itchi marks a return to traditional Sakha horror storytelling – horror is the most prominent genre in the Republic – combined with the higher production value found in the recent global-facing Sakha cinema. Its reworking of the locally beloved genre for diverse audiences (local, national, and global) marks an important juncture in the strategies used to promote Sakha identity through cinema.

Maappa was made in 1986, while the other three films were produced in the 2010s. We therefore read it as a matrix film; a film to which these three films harken in their contemporary discourses of Sakha selfhood. Traces of Maappa can be found in the rebellious female protagonist in Nuuchcha, thus despite her transgressiveness, this figure has persisted into the 2020s. It should also be noted that these four films were written and directed by men, and the films purposefully conflate Sakha identity with femaleness.⁵ This conflation also mirrors wider nation-building strategies globally, where the figure of the woman is also used to symbolise and unite the nation in diverse national contexts.

Using a close textual analysis approach to each film, we unpick the mechanics of how each female protagonist resists and challenges imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian cultural hegemony and, crucially, the internalised colonialism and ensuing hostility of her community. While Spirit of Itchi conforms most closely to the global folk horror genre in its aesthetics and style, we show that all four films to varying degrees draw on horror tropes to emphasise the female protagonists’ alienation and struggle for dignity and acceptance. Thus, like Sakha cinema itself, the ungovernable female protagonist functions as a cri-de-coeur for the respect and revival of Sakha culture in the wake of centuries of colonial oppression. This expression of resistance from the formerly colonised periphery is particularly poignant in light of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine and the Russian state’s unabashedly chauvinist and ethnonationalist narratives of history.⁶

Sakha Cultural Revival in Maappa (Aleksei Romanov, 1986)

The eponymous Maappa is undoubtedly one of the most important characters in Sakha culture, influencing all subsequent depictions of wronged women in Sakha cinema. Maappa (1986), which was Aleksei Romanov’s diploma work, is set in the mid-nineteenth century and tells the story of forbidden love between Ilzha, a young servant, and the eponymous undead maiden Maappa. Maappa is based on Sakha writer Nikolai Zabolotskii’s 1944 novella of the same name,⁷ and the film is a korotkometrazhka (short film) with only a twenty-minute runtime. Quite a few details from the novella are therefore omitted from the film; it is pared down to its essential characteristics. Travelling on horseback, we observe Ilzha as he stops by a deserted home where he encounters Maappa. It is revealed only later that she is undead (having killed herself aged sixteen). Maappa asks Ilzha to find her bones and give her a burial according to Sakha custom.

The film itself functions as a metaphor for the ungovernable female entity; through its title, Maappa, it revives the now-popular figure of the undead maiden brought to life in Zabolotskii’s novella, which itself is derived from ghost stories (tübelte) from Sakha folklore.⁸ Furthermore, it was the first ever fiction film made in the Sakha language, anticipating the Sakha linguistic-cultural resurgence that would take place (particularly through cinema) from the 1990s onwards after decades of Soviet oppression. The film was made in 1986, the beginning of the perestroika period, when Sakha citizens began claiming sovereignty prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. Specifically, 1986 saw the last significant instance of interethnic violence in the Republic, with violent clashes erupting between ethnic Sakha students from Yakutsk State University and ethnic Russian “toughs” in the Spring of that year (Balzer and Vinokurova 1996: 109). 1986 and Maappa, then, are important cultural moments in Sakha history that symbolise the resurgence of Sakha culture after centuries of colonial oppression, first under the Russian Empire and then under the Soviet Union.

The eponymous protagonist is an üör – a figure akin to the evil undead – who was once human but died a violent death and remained unburied. Like all üör, she inhabits a deserted settlement in a remote area of Sakha (known as an alaas). Üör threaten the normative social order with the pain, grudges, and secrets they bear towards their community. These characters are liminal beings, since they can interact with humans, provide knowledge of the past, and make the invisible visible or tangible. In the film, Maappa’s status as an üör is suggested from the very opening scene, which features the sonorous, extra-diegetic sounds of the guttural kylyhakh song that conveys a sense of despair and uncertainty in the atmosphere. After receiving his blessings from the Ytyk Maas magical tree, Ilzha stumbles upon the deserted cabin, where Maappa appears as an apparition at the cabin door, which resembles an entrance to another world. The male voiceover then asks: “What is this? Is it a dream, or is it reality?” Maappa, as an üör, inherently challenges notions of time, perceived reality, and conceptions of life and death, thereby disrupting the atheistic, scientific narrative of humanity and existence imposed by the Soviets on the Sakha people. She instead embodies Sakha beliefs on temporality, spirituality, and the universe formed of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Worlds.

In the film, Maappa tells the story of her suicide and the circumstances leading up to it: rumours of her suffering from leprosy had led to her being cast out by her community. Consequently, aged only sixteen, she was forced to live alone on the estate left to her by her parents. Maappa possesses gold, which she gifts to Ilzha for his kindness, respect for cultural traditions, and desire to maintain harmony across the three worlds of the Sakha universe. Thus, Maappa’s rehabilitation through Ilzha and Ilzha’s belief in and respect for Maappa’s lived experience and spiritual beliefs further symbolise hope for the revival of Sakha culture after centuries of colonial oppression. Traumatic stories, like Maappa’s, function as photographic documents of the past, reminding the Sakha people of that which was never allowed to be mourned or addressed under Imperial Russian and Soviet rule. Due to its cultural specificity and pared down visual aesthetics, Maappa is difficult for non-Sakha viewers to interpret, echoing Ivanilova and Majumdar’s analysis of Sakha horror film as embodying Indigenous refusal “to explain, perform or make things easy” for the non-Indigenous audience (Ivanilova and Majumdar 2023).⁹ Maappa is truly a film for its Sakha viewership.

In her community, Maappa represents order, beauty, and safety from enemies and diseases (i.e., from the harmful effects of outside forces), but when these expectations are not met, the community spurns her. As Maappa tells her story, she regains her authority, thus reclaiming her agency and defying the patriarchal social order imposed on her. Traditional Sakha culture had clearly delineated roles for men and women, with men primarily running affairs external to the household (Tarasova 2021: 5). However, in traditional Sakha society, women were typically accorded respect and were not ‘othered’ as per the gendered hierarchies endemic to Russian and other European settler colonial societies (Nikaeva, Starostina and Tarabukina 2021: 3-4). Intersectional Feminist, Post-Colonial, and Indigenous Studies scholarship have long demonstrated that colonialism is a fundamentally gendered process and that patriarchal social hierarchies that subjugated women are fundamental to colonial systems of power (Hall 2009; Spencer-Wood 2016; Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 2020). Indigenous Studies has also charted the ways in which Indigenous communities have internalised colonial patriarchal norms (Hall 2009). Maappa’s mistreatment by her community can be read as a product of its internalised colonialism and modernity; she is othered, vilified and pathologised as a ‘diseased’ woman.

The false rumours of Maappa’s disease introduce an element of the uncanny into Maappa’s story, whereby she is viewed as a figure of the Kristevan “abject” (Kristeva 1980). Her suicide represents a deeply taboo act in Sakha culture; a terrible, logical conclusion to her community’s spurning of her. Maappa ultimately demonstrates that compassion is an essential aspect of Sakha identity, a recurrent notion found across Sakha cinema, including in the two other films under our analysis in this article: Scarecrow and Spirit of Itchi.

The closing scene of the film shows Ilzha digging a grave in the snow for Maappa to fulfil her wish of being buried. In the final moments of the film, we observe Maappa as a free soul, wandering joyfully through the forest of the Upper World. Crucially, these final shots are visualised in colour, whereas the film is primarily shot in sepia. An intense golden light bathes Maappa and the forest in contrast to the darkly tinted earlier scenes. These final images denote a symbolic shift from winter to summer, from Maappa’s oppression to her liberation, anticipating the liberation of the Sakha people from Soviet rule in just five short years after the film was made.

Maappa the film and Maappa the character together symbolise Sakha identity in the wake of Soviet repression as well as the restoration of Sakha cultural values. Maappa’s mistreatment, social ostracism, and desire for closure according to Sakha rituals (burial) mirror the repression of Sakha identity under the Soviet regime and the Sakha people’s desire for sovereignty and respect. Through her suicide, status as an üör, and relationship with Ilzha, she transgresses repressive social norms and time. Her significance in Sakha culture is such that she has become a stock character in Sakha horror, representing the female protagonist as both a monster and a liminal creature – one who links imaginary realms with reality and, through that process, makes traditional storytelling possible.

The Problematic, Unruly Female Protagonist(s) of My Killer (Kostas Marsan, 2016)

The 2016 debut film by Kostas Marsan My Killer, like Maappa, focuses on an unruly female protagonist that subverts the social order. As noted in the Introduction, the film was made in the wake of the colonialist law that granted Russians entitlement to land in the Far East, thus it can also be read as a complex story of the vengeance of Sakha nature contaminated by ongoing colonial practices.¹⁰ The film’s plot predominantly focuses on the police investigation of the murder of a young woman, Liuba Sofronova. Initially, it seems Liuba was killed by her jealous gold-smuggler boyfriend. In the film’s final scenes, we find out that Liuba is in fact alive, and that she has killed her twin sister Vera, who had discovered a stash of gold and had confronted, and attempted to blackmail, Liuba. My Killer was screened at several international film festivals including the Spirit of Fire festival in Russia, Moscow International Film Festival, and the Asian World Film Festival in Los Angeles. The film is therefore part of the Sakha international film boom that took place from 2016.

Although the focus of the film is the police investigation into Vera’s murder, it is fundamentally preoccupied with Sakha nature, in particular Lake Saisary and its surrounding landscape. Thus, the ungovernable female is conflated here with the nature of Sakha, which dominates the diegesis and bears witness to the crimes against nature and the murder of Vera by her twin sister Liuba. In Sakha culture, water bodies are gendered as feminine, and rivers, lakes, and seas are considered ebe (grandmother) and are revered and respected as such (Burnasheva 2020: 6; Crate 2013: 118). As Crate (2013) explains, water is integral to the Sakha spirit world: the Sakha people believe that “Uu ichchiileekh” (water has a spirit), and according to Sakha cosmology, humans need to respect this spirit when interacting with water (ibid).

Lake Saisary in the film functions as a metonym for the Sakha nature that was exploited by the Soviets for gold but nonetheless remains perennial. The wide panoramic shots of the lake and surrounding nature reveal their overwhelming sublimeness. The sublime is a fundamentally Eurocentric, colonial concept: when applied to Indigenous-occupied landscapes, it invariably excludes the Indigenous subject and portrays the Indigenous’ peoples land as a space to be dominated and/or a means to reinvigorate the colonial subject through its “awesomeness” (Nida, 2019). Marsan, however, utilises the aesthetics of the sublime as testament to the ungovernability of the Sakha nature, which may be exploited and extracted by Imperial Russian, Soviet and indeed, post-Soviet (neo)colonialism (as per the 2016 land-granting law), but nonetheless remains elusive and unruly.

The lake and surrounding area are also presented as a complex, contradictory space. What was once a vital reservoir used by the Sakha locals as a watering hole for cattle and a site for fishing is today teeming with homeless people and brigands and is in a general state of dilapidation. This duality adds to the uncanny visual and affective qualities of the film: the characters of Vera/Liuba mirror the duality of the lake and surrounding nature. In the film, the surface of the water glares threateningly; it is a liminal space where strange creatures may lurk. In the final part of the film, in which the police investigator confronts Liuba at Lake Saisary, she appears like a mermaid in the lake, her long dark hair framing her face and body. This visualisation of Liuba is deliberate: mermaids are an important aspect of Sakha water folklore, and the filmmaker, Kostas Marsan, has stated in interview that he was keen to bring the figure of the mermaid to the surface and into the “mundane nightlife of the city, before sending her back into the water”.¹¹ Liuba, a being of the water, moves into the space of the city and disrupts its social order by committing murder, specifically sororicide. Her disruptive presence represents the succumbing of the rational imperialist order to nature and its powers.

Indeed, in contrast to Lake Saisary, the city of Yakutsk is portrayed as the only surviving oasis of order and predictability. It is a space populated by ethnic Russian men that occupy dominant social positions (e.g. in state institutions like the police, where the commanding officer is a Russian man), and where inhabitants drive around the city’s streets in bulky, expensive SUVs. The Sakha capital is thus presented as a masculine space that stands for the russified, patriarchal social order. There is nonetheless a distinct artificiality to the city, in contrast to the terrible authenticity of the lake and its landscape. This artificiality is encapsulated in the scene depicting a digital advertisement for luxury earrings produced with diamonds from the Republic. The camera then cuts from this advertisement to shots of Yakutsk’s slum in the 17th District, a space teeming with alcoholics and garbage. These stark images appear almost post-apocalyptic, but this is not a fait accompli: Liuba, Vera’s murder, and the deep unease felt throughout the film threaten the prevailing social order.

Liuba is a distinctly complex figure; she represents to an extreme degree the internalised colonialism that invokes individuals’ desire to conform to hegemonic norms.¹² Liuba thus embodies the notion that Indigenous populations have been contaminated by modernity and, in this instance, post-Soviet capitalism, where greed, overconsumption and individual advancement are encouraged to the detriment of the community and altruism (which, as we have seen in Maappa, are fundamental Sakha cultural values). Liuba’s desire for luxury jewellery, a Moscow apartment, and crucially, gold, which leads to her committing the horrific act of sororicide, brings to the surface the tensions and contradictions associated with being a colonised subject who is dependent on the socio-cultural norms and ideology of the coloniser.

Furthermore, Liuba’s character also gestures to the notion of the colonised subject’s self-hatred. This concept has been discussed in numerous scholarly works, most notably Frantz Fanon’s seminal essay Black Skin White Masks (1952) and V.S. Naipaul’s novel Half a Life (2001), which provide foundational investigations of the colonised subject’s fragmented perceptions of selfhood. Liuba’s confusion and guilt are apparent in the scene where, after altering her appearance to resemble her dead sister Vera, she sees herself reflected in multiple mirrors, and bears a pained expression. This discomfort is reinforced when the detective asks her, “where were you planning to run away?” to which she responds, “I was probably running away from myself.” The post-Soviet capitalist social order, then, has made this female protagonist far more alienated from herself than Maappa (who nonetheless had a clear sense of self), which is an indictment of the insidious nature of modern neoliberal capitalism and its fundamental misalliance with traditional Sakha cultural values and identity.

The narratives of suicide and sororicide in Maappa and My Killer serve to uncover the traumatic pasts and experiences of the Sakha people. Although traumatised by the ‘civilising’ processes on their path to becoming a part of an industrialised empire, the Sakha people have remained faithful to making these traumatic experiences legible through kepseenner (stories) and translating the phenomenon of horror into that of the transcendent eschatological dominance of the nature on screen. Where Maappa represents the fear of being abandoned without communal support, and remaining unburied and invisible, My Killer reveals the cruelty and violence that can emerge from being othered, exploited, and traded for gold. Both films, however, implicitly give voice to the dead silenced women who educate their audience about the challenges and tragedies facing the Sakha people.

Scarecrow (2020) and the Ostracised Female Healer

In contrast to Vera/Liuba and the feminised nature in My Killer, the female protagonist in Dmitrii Davydov’s Scarecrow functions as a more straightforward, unambiguous repository of Sakha identity. Scarecrow is Davydov’s third feature-length film, and over the past seven years, he has become one of the most important auteur filmmakers in the Russian Federation. Davydov is of mixed heritage: his mother is Russian and his father is Sakha, but he has lived his entire life in the Republic, working as a schoolteacher in the Amga region. He has garnered a reputation for producing hard-hitting, social realist dramas (including Koster na vetru / The Bonfire, 2016; Net boga krome menia / There Is No God But Me, 2019; and Nelegal / Illegal, 2022) that focus on contemporary issues in the Sakha Republic. While Davydov’s first two films were presented and acclaimed at numerous film festivals celebrating Indigenous, Asian, Russian, and Arctic cinemas, it was Scarecrow that truly propelled him into the national and (wider) international limelight; the film won the Grand Prize at the 2020 Kinotavr Film Festival. Despite his mixed heritage, he has consequently become the global face of Sakha cinema. The film focuses on a woman living in a remote Sakha village who possesses extraordinary abilities as a healer. She is nonetheless ostracised by her local community and abuses vodka to drown out her trauma and loneliness.

In an interview with The Moscow Times, Davydov proclaimed that “the film isn’t Yakutian and it isn’t Russian…it is a story that is understandable to every viewer, it’s not a film about a healer, but about kindness, self-sacrifice and conscience” (Skopich 2021). While true to an extent (all of Davydov’s films appeal to the universal human condition), the film is imbibed with specifically Indigenous experiences and Sakha culture. In his review of the film, Russian film critic Anton Dolin asserted that “one cannot avoid the sad metaphor: Yakut cinema is as miraculous and alien to our often glossy and fake industry as Scarecrow is to her fellow villagers” (Dolin 2020). Further to this, we contend that like Maappa before her, Scarecrow herself represents a long repressed, vilified Sakha culture that functions in opposition to a patriarchal, russified, post-Soviet Sakha society (embodied by Scarecrow’s local community). As we will show, it is her synonymy with nature and the Sakha land that enables her to challenge the post-Soviet Sakha status quo.

Scarecrow’s oneness with nature is signalled from the very opening shot of the film. A static long shot depicts the protagonist standing in the middle of a snow-covered field with her arms and hands outstretched, panting rhythmically through her bared lower teeth: she is drawing energy from the surrounding nature (Beumers 2021). The woman is the eponymous Scarecrow – a barrier between nature and the humans that seek to cultivate the land and exploit it for their own purpose, a figure who wards off evil on their behalf. Unlike the well-kempt women in her village, she also visually resembles a scarecrow for much of the film, possessing a distinctly dishevelled appearance with messy hair, a bruised, disfigured face, dirtied clothes, and mismatched boots. Scarecrow’s overall disinterest in conforming to patriarchal, russified ideals of femininity mirrors her refusal to disguise her true nature and integrate herself within the local, russified Sakha community, who, unlike Scarecrow, have largely spurned traditional Sakha practices.¹³

Indeed, it quickly emerges that Scarecrow is a healer with unrivalled capabilities. We first encounter her as she is ushered into the village’s clinic where a young woman is bleeding out from a gunshot wound. The village’s limited medical resources (and the young woman’s urgent condition) mean that the only option for Ivan, the local policeman, is to seek Scarecrow’s help. In this scene we are thus privy to a cycle that will repeat itself throughout the film: a very reluctant Scarecrow is persuaded to heal the injured party, she then strips to her bare chest and crawls over the sick person, sniffing and breathing loudly and rapidly, before sucking the ailment from their body and curing them. The ritual is at once animalistic and sexual, in which Scarecrow rids herself of any remaining signifiers of socialisation (her barely passable comportment and appearance) to perform this remarkable feat.

In her seminal investigation of female monsters in cinema predominantly from the West, Barbara Creed wrote that “the monstrous-feminine draws attention to the frailty of the symbolic order through her evocation of the natural, animal order” (Creed 1993: 83). Scarecrow, a monstrous figure to her community, goes further still. She innately defies and transcends the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes of ‘civility’, since she abandons both modern medicine and the cleavage of humanity from nature imposed by the Soviets on the Sakha people. Throughout the film, we see that the only viable solution to the villagers’ afflictions is a recourse to traditional Sakha healing practices that were so repressed during the Soviet regime (Mandelstam Balzer 2008). In so doing, Scarecrow subverts the longstanding colonial, racist pathologisation of Indigenous bodies as “dirty and contaminating” (Swanson 2007: 713), as Scarecrow uses her ‘unclean’ body and performs a ‘dirty’ act (sucking their wounds) to cure the sick.

It is apparent, however, that Scarecrow’s endeavours come at a grave personal price: she is frequently physically ill after each healing episode. Furthermore, she is an alcoholic, binging on vodka after she cures each person to mask her physical and psychological trauma. We learn early on just how socially ostracised she is: Scarecrow is refused service in the village supermarket, she is vilified as a ‘quack’ and physically harassed by the local men, and the windows of her home are smashed in. In her distinctly unmodern clothes and unmodern ways, Scarecrow serves as an uncomfortable reminder of Sakha culture prior to the Imperial Russian and Soviet ‘civilising’ mission. In essence, she is a figure of Kristevan abjection for her community, like Maappa was before her. Indeed, we can perceive in the villagers’ hostility to Scarecrow a deep-seated internalised colonial mentality, whereby the aspirations of ‘respectability’ and ‘civilisation’ mean that those that are deemed to fall short of these standards are excluded or ostracised. This is a widespread phenomenon noted by scholars of Indigenous and postcolonial communities in numerous postcolonial settings around the world (Dosekun 2016).

Scarecrow’s social vilification seems peripheral, however, to her central trauma, which is revealed towards the end of the film. She is searching for a young woman, who we learn is her daughter, and elicits the help of the policeman Ivan in finding her. It transpires that the young woman is now a sex worker, having been taken into state care as a child and spent two years in an adolescent correctional facility. Scarecrow is horrified and seemingly refuses to accept this version of her daughter’s life. Scarecrow’s narrative of generational trauma and substance abuse (which are part of the fallout from colonialism) is of course not limited to the Sakha experience. Scarecrow’s story resonates with those of Indigenous communities globally and has been the subject of much scholarly analysis, particularly in the North American and Australasian contexts (Wexler 2014; Aho 2014). By gesturing to global narratives of Indigenous trauma, the film semantically links the local with the global, and conspicuously bypasses the national in its figuration of contemporary Sakha identity.

In the film’s final episode, Scarecrow seeks to break the cycle of trauma. Symbolically, Scarecrow, who was unable to care for her own daughter, goes to heal another woman’s child, having ignored the woman’s entreaties for help thus far. This final healing proves to be an act too far – where the formerly bed-ridden girl is now able to walk, Scarecrow collapses and dies from her efforts. In this final act, one cannot help recalling Davydov’s assertion that his film is about “kindness and self-sacrifice” (Skopich 2021). Akin to Ilzha’s generosity and selflessness towards Maappa, these healing feats are presented as inherent to the authentic Sakha identity that Scarecrow embodies, since we deduce that none of the local community would be able or willing to commit such a selfless act. Overarchingly, Scarecrow the character and Scarecrow the film encapsulate the Republic’s commitment to celebrating traditional Sakha spiritual values and identity through cinema. In so doing, they subvert the dominant post-Soviet Russian cultural, social, and ideological hegemony that has imposed itself in all aspects of Sakha life.

Sakha Female Vengeance in Spirit of Itchi (Kostas Marsan, 2020)

While Scarecrow’s inherent non-conformity to Sakha ‘civil’ society enables her to perform miraculous acts of healing, the female protagonist’s non-conformity and social exclusion in Spirit of Itchi (2020) provokes violent revenge and a generational curse. Spirit of Itchi is Kostas Marsan’s second feature film, released four years after My Killer. Marsan has explained in an interview that he wanted the film to return to the roots of the Sakha horror tradition, which is a major film genre in Sakha cinema (Afanasʹev 2021). The film is a distinctly contemporary take on horror, however: unlike the three films previously examined in this article, it fully embraces and conforms to the tropes and aesthetics associated with the global cinematic horror genre, albeit with a distinctly Sakha inflection. The film is seemingly divided into two parts: the first is set in the present day and focuses on a dysfunctional family living on a farm in the remote Sakha countryside. Longstanding tensions between the two adult sons Timir and Aisen culminate in a nasty confrontation, but this is interrupted by supernatural events that unfold at night, whereby evil spirits on the land attack and kill each family member.

For a Sakha film, Spirit of Itchi was made on a markedly high budget (26 million roubles, representing more than twenty times the average budget), with elaborate special effects and cinematography intended to secure its place within the global folk horror genre. Like Scarecrow, the film was screened at film festivals in Asia and Europe, but its deliberately ambiguous narrative structure and references to Sakha mysticism rendered it somewhat inaccessible for non-Sakha viewers (Dolin 2021). Like Maappa before it, the film can be seen, as Ivanilova and Majumdar have argued, as a form of Indigenous refusal, a deliberate orienting in local Indigenous culture without seeking to explain or elucidate to non-Sakha audiences (Ivanilova and Majumdar 2023). As we show, this refusal is nonetheless hampered by aesthetics associated with the global horror film genre; thus, the film remains a powerful fusion of the local and the global in line with the rest of the global-facing, post-2016 Sakha cinema.

Spirit of Itchi is imbued even more profoundly with Sakha mysticism than Scarecrow: the family drama in the first part of Spirit of Itchi constitutes something of a red herring compared to its core concerns. The importance of mysticism is signalled by the film’s title that evokes the concept of ichchi, which according to Sakha spiritual beliefs, is the guardian spirit of objects, natural phenomena, and places – all living things should have ichchi. The absence of ichchi from an entity renders it soulless and desolate (Vinokurov 2017: 38). Ichchi, its absence, and restoration form an important strand of coherence in the otherwise loose narrative structure of the film.

Two-thirds of the way through Spirit of Itchi, we learn that the horrifying attacks on each family member can be traced to events that took place on the farm two centuries previously. The younger brother Aisen picks up an unburied skull (his mother explains that people had their heads removed when they were possessed by evil spirits), and this provokes a flashback. A young girl, Maappa, has leprosy and is forced to live apart from her family on the farm and cover her lesions with a disturbing birch mask. When the lonely Maappa sneaks in to see her baby brother, her parents cruelly banish her to a barn, cursing the day she was born. That night, Maappa is invaded by evil spirits and kills her parents, burning down the farm. A shaman is called to banish the evil, bury Maappa’s skull, and restore ichchi to the land. The shaman is unsuccessful in this, and the enraged, unburied Maappa becomes an üör, a restless soul that stalks the land, unable to ascend to the Upper World.

It is no coincidence that the girl is named Maappa: she clearly references the seminal 1986 film discussed earlier in this article. The 2020 film leans heavily on the 1986 film’s narrative attributes: both girls were socially ostracised and excluded for their association with a leprosy-like disease, both died and became üör. While 1986 Maappa initially subverts the social order by killing herself, a cultural taboo that she nonetheless undertakes to reclaim her agency, 2020 Maappa enacts violent revenge, likewise refusing to accept her subordinate social status. Spirit of Itchi also evokes Scarecrow by underscoring the pain of generational trauma through the ostracised female protagonist. However, this trauma is visualised to full effect in Spirit of Itchi through the aesthetics and tropes of the global horror genre, albeit in a distinctly Sakha iteration. These include the haunting kyryympa (Sakha string instrument) musical score, canted camera angles, horrifying special effects, and the sequential deaths of each family member. Through its aesthetics, then, the film roots itself in the local and references the global, thereby circumventing the national, in a subtle but distinct negation of post-Soviet Russian hegemony.

Furthermore, in an interview with Mir television company, Marsan has stated that the inspiration for the film was the story of a girl living in nineteenth-century rural Sakha who was similarly excluded by her parents (Marsan 2021) – thus denoting the teenage Maappa’s semantic importance within Spirit of Itchi. The film’s narrative is also drawn from the darker recesses of nineteenth-century Sakha history: leprosy was a widespread issue in late nineteenth-century Sakha, with lepers banished to colonies and doomed to live their lives in wretched isolation (Bessonov 2018). Maappa’s banishment by her parents thus echoes the cordon sanitaire imposed on Indigenous lepers in Russia, as well as numerous other colonial settings, including Australia, the Philippines, and Malay (Bashford 2004: 92-103). Where Scarecrow was met with fear for her healing powers that defy post-Soviet modernity, Maappa is feared for a disease that saw Indigenous people particularly targeted by ill-treatment and moral panics in numerous colonial contexts by the late nineteenth century (Bashford 2004: 81). Bashford (ibid.:107) explains that colonial fears of leprosy were also imbued with fears around miscegenation (since leprosy was theorised as a sexually transmitted disease in certain colonial contexts, such as Australia). As with the families and communities in Maappa and Scarecrow, Maappa’s family in Spirit of Itchi seemed to have internalised the racist pathologisation of Indigenous, female bodies as contagious and horrifying. Maappa’s vengeance, then, can be read as a vengeance against a patriarchal, russified Sakha social order.

Like Scarecrow, Maappa’s power comes from her synonymy with the Sakha land and nature and therefore Sakha identity itself. Rather than harnessing her power for good, however, the aggrieved Maappa, taken on by evil spirits, permeates every part of the land to threaten the humans that subsequently live upon it. Notably, the film begins with the land being disturbed by a tractor, an act that seems to ‘awaken’ Maappa and trigger the supernatural events that will occur in the film. Indeed, the disturbance of the land is a contentious issue in Sakha: there are significant complications that come with disturbing the Sakha land, which is comprised of permafrost that is essential to maintaining the ecosystem and environment (Burtseva, Sleptsov et al. 2022). Thus, the use of a tractor, a signifier of modernity, that disturbs the farmland and provokes the supernatural events could also be read as the vengeance of the land/Maappa on this ‘modernised’ family.

Maappa’s embeddedness in the land is alluded to throughout the film. Aisen and Timir’s mother recalls how her grandfather saw the apparition of a girl (Maappa) searching for a baby (her brother) and exclaims that the land is apparently so cursed that “even shamans wouldn’t go there”. Like in Scarecrow, the signifiers of modernity and ‘civilisation’ – in this case, a car (to escape), a tractor (to cultivate the land), and medicine (to cure Aisen and Timir’s dying father) – are completely redundant against the evil that has saturated the land. While Maappa is only introduced as a character in the final segment of the film, she and her demons’ presence are felt from the very outset. They are imbricated in the long shots that depict a desolate land, in the disturbing, disjointed shots of the farm (that hint at the fragmentation within Maappa’s family) and, crucially, the discord that underpins the relationships within the present-day family.

The unleashing of evil towards the present-day family is also facilitated through the animosity directed at a child – in this case, Aisen, the youngest son. It is fitting, therefore, that Aisen – whose name means ‘grandson of the gods of the Upper World’ (aiyy) in contrast to his more earthly-named brother Timir (whose name signifies ‘iron’ or ‘iron-hearted’) – should be the one to break the cycle of evil. Aisen completes the shamanic ceremony to banish the evil spirits and restore ichchi to the land. In the final moments of the film, we glean that the spirit of Aisen is now ichchi, the guardian spirit, wandering on horseback through the land.

In contrast to Maappa, the film’s other two female characters do not transcend corporeality or time. Liza, Timir’s Russian wife, doesn’t speak Sakha or understand the culture, while Saina, the men’s mother, wryly exclaims that she does not believe her farm is haunted as they are “sovremennye liudi” (modern people). Both women are killed by the evil spirits, their comparative ephemerality is linked to their lack or abandonment of Sakha cultural values. Ultimately, Maappa and Scarecrow, as wronged female protagonists, are Sakha incarnate, their stories metaphors for the reassertion of a land and people violated through colonialism and enforced ‘civility’. Both films draw upon universal cinematic aesthetics (art house and horror respectively) to enhance these distinctly Sakha stories, bypassing any contemporary Russian cultural identification and propelling Sakha narratives onto the global stage.

Conclusion

This article has analysed the representation and role of an important (yet hitherto unexamined) figure within Sakha cinema: that of the ungovernable female protagonist. Across our analysis of these four films, we have shown that through her association with the Sakha land and nature (which is so vital to Sakha identity), she functions as a repository of Sakha culture and values, long repressed under Imperial Russian and Soviet rule. Crucially, she frequently rebels against her own Sakha community, who have internalised lingering perspectives from the Imperial Russian and Soviet eras of Sakha traditions and culture as ‘other’ and ‘uncivil’ and for whom she is a source of discomfort or even horror. Thus, her eventual triumph against modernity serves as a reminder to the Sakha audience to not forget Sakha traditions and beliefs (particularly in the primacy of nature). More broadly, she functions in parallel to Sakha cinema itself, which serves as a medium to return the coloniser’s gaze, resist, and make the invisible visible.

While Sakha cinema has developed over the past three decades, becoming ever more infused with global and transnational aesthetics, themes, and genres, so too has the ungovernable female protagonist narrative developed, encapsulating the struggles of Indigenous people globally, as seen in My Killer, Scarecrow, and Spirit of Itchi. The invocation of the local and global is another means by which the national is bypassed, in a true subversion of post-Soviet Russian cultural (and political) hegemony in the Republic. This challenge to the russified status quo undoubtedly has even greater resonance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its ensuing chauvinistic narratives of its former colonies, representing an important revolt of the ‘periphery’ against the so-called ‘centre’.

Adelaide McGinity-Peebles
The University of Nottingham
adelaide.mcginity-peebles@nottingham.ac.uk

Natalya Khokholova
Defence Language Institute Foreign Language Center
natalya.khokolova@dliflc.edu

Acknowledgement

With gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support in the form of Adelaide McGinity-Peebles’s Early Career Fellowship and research funding.

Bio

Adelaide McGinity-Peebles (PhD in Russian Studies, University of Manchester, 2020) is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Since 2021, she has been conducting her Leverhulme Trust-funded research project: “Figurations of the Arctic in Russian Cinema, 2010 – Present”. Her research interests lie in contemporary Arctic and Russian cinemas, and more broadly in the representations of Indigeneity, race, gender, sexuality, class, and local identities in contemporary cinema. She has contributed articles on race, Indigeneity, and gender in Russian and Eurasian film to Film Studies, The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, The Oxford Research Encylopedia of Communication, and The Slavic and East European Journal. She is currently working on her first monograph on the contemporary Russian and Indigenous cinema of the Arctic.

Natalya Khokholova (PhD in Slavic Languages & Literature, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2015) is from the Sakha Republic, Russia. She uses ancestral knowledge to untangle the mysteries of cultural practices and emphasises the importance of storytelling as a healing practice and means of reclaiming the lost identities of the Sakha people. She has authored articles on the financial adventures of characters in nineteenth-century Russian novels, gender in Soviet film, Sergei Eisenstein’s aesthetics, and romanticism. She has also published articles on familial occultism in Sakha culture and lost and found children in the Russian subarctic in Sibirica (2021). Natalya is currently completing a monograph titled Enchanted Forests and Absent Fathers: Stories of Abandonment and Redemption of Changelings/Feral Children (Lexington Books, forthcoming, 2024).

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Suggested Citation

McGinity-Peebles, Adelaide and Natalya Khokholova. 2023. “Maappa and the Ungovernable Female Protagonists of Sakha Cinema”. Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen I (ed. by Heleen Gerritsen). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 17. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2023.00017.338.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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