Nutag - Homeland
2016 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Alisi Telengut
Genres: animation, experimental, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
A hand-painted, non-narrative visual poem and surrealist requiem for the Kalmyk people, who were mass-deported to Siberia by Stalin's Soviet regime during and after WWII (1943-1957), with nearly half dying before they were allowed to return home. Through ever-shifting oil-pastel imagery, the film restores a near-erased history on the eternal theme of diaspora and the loss of homeland.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would've made this a straightforward historical documentary and called it righteousness; Telengut instead dissolves the Kalmyk deportation into pure abstraction, which somehow makes the erasure *more* visceral than any talking head ever could.
The single-sheet oil-pastel technique situates this film in a lineage of structural animation—Len Lye, Norman McLaren—while the visual language of melting and reformation becomes formal argument about cultural memory itself; this is craft in service of profound historical witness.
The decision to abandon cuts entirely and instead let every landscape flow into the next through continuous erasure on one sheet of paper transforms what could've been a montage into something that *feels* like forgetting and returning happening at once.
Reviews
Painted frame by frame, a vivid animation restores a history lost to deportation.
Every frame hand-painted, Nutag-Homeland finds its voice in its fluid, abstract, ever-shifting landscapes and vivid use of sound, framing each shot like its images were melting into one another.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2017
- Festival de Cannes (Short Film Corner) 2016