Chris Marker
LETTER FROM SIBERIA
1957, 92 mins, digital

This early feature from Chris Marker is a key touchstone in the evolution of his distinctive essayistic style, in which he combines footage shot in the barren reaches of Siberia with his typically idiosyncratic musings. Animated mammoths, a humorous comparison of communist and capitalist values, and even a “commercial” for reindeer all feature in this alternately witty and philosophical travelogue that reveals as much about the history and culture of its subject as it does about the inner workings of its maker’s mind.

Svetlana Romanova, Chelsea Tuggle
Тарыҥ SEASON OF DYING WATER
2022, 62 mins, digital 

Images of Siberia are often limited to exoticized portraits of rural communities living in harsh conditions, often its residents cast as provincial wanderers stuck in a different time. Aiming to visually describe a more grounded contemporary reality, The Season of Dying Water argues that life in and around Yakutsk is more complicated. Inspired by Chris Marker’s 1957 travelog film Lettre de Sibérie, Тарыҥ offers an update 65 years later.

Svetlana Romanova was born in Yakutsk, Russia and studied visual arts in Los Angeles. She has received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design, and MFA in California Institute of the Arts. From 2009 to 2014, she studied, lived and worked in arts education in California.
After returning to Siberia in 2015, she started working on several film projects about her hometown and regions around it. Her video practice is an investigation of two local indigenous groups that she belongs to - Sakha and Even.

Chelsea Tuggle is a filmmaker and artist living in Los Angeles.

Chris Marker (b. July 29 1921 - July 30 2012) was a writer, photographer, filmmaker, multi-media artist and world traveller, whose cinematic essays have been challenging audiences for more than half a century with their complex queries about time, memory and the nature of truth. A self-effacing figure who was rarely interviewed and even more rarely photographed (when asked for a picture of himself, he usually offered a photograph of a cat instead), Marker is considered by many critics as one of the most important directors in the world. His prolific output as a filmmaker included such landmarks as Lettre de Sibérie (1957), La Jetée (1962), Le Joli Mai (1963), Sans Soleil (1983) and Level Five (1997). (New Wave Film)