Alexander Lukin: With our film, we seemed to have opened some kind of forbidden box …

Director Alexander Lukin is a young filmmaker with only a few films to his credit. But all of them deserve special attention, as they reflect the history of his native land – Yakutia, telling about the fate of people who came there from afar. The painting “White Angel of the Tundra”, based on the play by Vasily Vasilyev-Kharyskhal, tells the story of a young girl-doctor Kapitolina Oblezova. In 1937, she came to work in the remote northern village of Zhilinda and faced an epidemic of typhoid fever. The heroism and courage that this girl showed formed the basis of the story. At the recent festival “Chernorechye Fest” the film received an award for the best cinematography. Director Alexander Lukin spoke about how the film “White Angel of the Tundra” was created.

– Alexander, let me congratulate you on the award, indeed, the camera work is amazing! But the theme of your film is not just difficult, but difficult on the highest scale of impossibility. Why did they take her on?

– When I first encountered this story, it captured me completely. At first it was a play. It was written by our people’s writer Vasily Vasilyev-Kharyskhal. The play was successfully staged in Yakut theaters for many years, and then it was decided to make a film based on it. At the very beginning of the picture, you see the credits: “Based on true events.” This is really a real story about a young girl-doctor Kapitolina Oblezova. The author of the play, Vasily Egorovich, is a real researcher, he does not write history if he does not own the material. He worked a lot in the archives, traveled to St. Petersburg twice, raised documents, even found the genealogy of the Oblezov family: it turns out that the great-great-grandfather of our Kapitolina served at the court under Peter the Great, this is an old medical dynasty.

By the will of fate, in 1937, fleeing repression, she ended up in our area. And when a young girl faced an epidemic, she showed such an incredible example of courage and mercy that her memory lives on to this day. We could judge her actions during the epidemic by the letters she wrote to her parents.

– And how did it happen that these letters were not sent and became public domain?

— They were found by chance. In the 70s, when the old dispensary building was being demolished, a cache was found under the floorboards, in which these letters were stored. They were addressed to their parents, but since the war was already brewing, the air route was closed, Kapitolina did not have the opportunity to send them to Leningrad. Also, due to the fact that planes did not fly to them, the girl did not have medicines. There was only one suitcase with medicines, a smallpox vaccine, which, according to the doctor’s law, she had to take herself, but then one of the patients would not have enough. She saved the vaccine, and instead of drinking it herself, she gave the last dose to the sick girl, and she eventually survived.

– Where did you get such information?

“I managed to meet with the descendants of this surviving girl. Her grandson works at the museum, they remember Kapitolina Oblezova and revere her as their savior. I also met with old-timers reindeer herders. There was such Anna Khristoforovna, an old woman, she, unfortunately, has already left. So she said that she saw Kapitolina the doctor, and when we found the main character for this role, played by the young actress Anastasia Korolenko, Anna Khristoforovna, seeing the photographs, said that the resemblance to Kapitolina is very great: the same inner beauty, and the same unbending strength.

– There are very colorful episodes with shamans in the film, ancient rites are shown so authentically. Are these real people? And does this phenomenon still exist in the Yakut culture?

– Undoubtedly. We, the Yakuts, still believe in the sun, believe in the soul, we have our own faith, our own culture, which has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. We have the veneration of shamanic rituals already in our blood, so it’s hard for me to explain to you the whole essence of what is happening, but shamans are an integral part of our culture. They are respected in society, listen to them, consult with them. These are people who see, hear and understand much more than others.

– And what did you personally feel while working? What is helping or hindering?

– In general, in the North, beyond the Arctic Circle, in the Oleneksky district, it is almost impossible to work. Neither tourists nor film crews ever come there, we are probably the only film crew that filmed in real conditions, in 55 degrees below zero. In order to take pictures of the beauty of the northern region, sometimes I had to spend the night in tents on expeditions, the cold was incredible, not all adult men could stand it. Our heroine was played by a sophomore of the theater department, and all the other heroes are real reindeer herders, real residents. And I will say that not all the actors coped with this task, there were those who refused – the conditions were too difficult for filming. I myself repeatedly had a desire to refuse work, there was such heaviness and tension that it was beyond words. I, as a person who believes in spirits, believe that cinema has magical properties, somehow at one moment I became afraid to touch this material, despite the fact that the story sunk into my soul. And my fears were confirmed. We had many expeditions, but they all started to fail. Cinema has such a property – it can penetrate life. When we started preparing and shooting the picture in 2017 and got close to the topic, there was no pandemic yet, no coronavirus, but when the shooting period began, an epidemic suddenly broke out. Everyone began to get sick indiscriminately, as if we had opened some secret, forbidden box with our film. What the viewer saw in the picture, how to vaccinate, wear masks, escape from infection, everything was then repeated in real life. This scared our actors so badly that many of them quit their jobs, had to throw out the footage with the old actors and start over. I was in complete despair.

Why didn’t you stop then and keep filming?

– Unexpectedly for myself, I realized what the problem is with these shootings: you need to let go of the soul of the girl. I had many signs, I felt that she was somewhere near me and asked her for help. And for his part, he began to sympathize with her, understood the whole tragedy of her life, all her suffering, because she could not leave this earth and was somewhere nearby in a subtle plane, as if lost. The soul of this young girl could not leave, because she did not live her life, did not know love or happiness, did not create a family, did not leave offspring, could not finally see and say goodbye to her parents, so she had many regrets, not letting her off the ground. She practically sacrificed herself, she didn’t even have a grave. During the epidemic, all the dead people were buried away from the camp, away from the dwellings, so today it is impossible to find burials. At some point, I realized that this film must be made at all costs. It is necessary that people look at it and feel sorry for this girl. So that the audience sincerely sympathize with her and thereby release her soul. I started acting like a shaman, I will not reveal all my secrets, but I set such a goal for myself and made the film. I really wanted her to remain in the memory and hearts of people.

— You said that you had some signs. Is this some sort of coincidence or unusual occurrence?

– Signs are like an open book, you just need to be able to read them, and they are present everywhere in our lives. Signs are not accidental, for example, when the program director of Chernorechye Fest Alexandra Zhukova invited me to this festival, at first I thought that it was somewhere else, not in the Nizhny Novgorod region. And when he arrived, he found out that he was in the homeland of his grandmother, she herself comes from these parts. My father’s mother was born in the Nizhny Novgorod region and lived there during the Soviet era, and then moved with my grandfather to his homeland in Yakutia. It so happened that I unexpectedly visited the homeland of my ancestors and, thanks to this film, honored their memory. I have long dreamed of doing this, I put it off, but fate decreed that everything worked out by itself.

The interview was conducted by Anzhela Yakubovskaya.

Photo by the press service of the film festival “Chernorechye Fest”