Exploring tradition and change through song: “Seven Songs from the Tundra” at the 2025 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film

A seminal work, Seven Songs from the Tundra (2000) confronts the viewer with the stark reality of Russian-turned-Soviet colonialism. The film’s poetic narrative structure, told through song, juxtaposes its realist, raw depictions of the struggles of the indigenous Nenets people. It retains its salience today not least due to recent conversations on the decolonisation of Russia. 

Seven Songs from the Tundra, co-directed by Nenets director and screenwriter Anastasia Lapsui and her husband the Finnish director Markku Lehmuskallio, was the first ever feature film produced in the Nenets language. Their collective oeuvre includes ten co-directed films focusing on the Nenets, Sami, and other indigenous peoples the world over. Seven Songs from the Tundra won a number of prizes at European film festivals, including best Nordic film at the Norwegian Film Festival.

Its retrospective at the 2025 goEast Film Festival draws crucial renewed attention to the plight of indigenous communities that have suffered under Russian, then Soviet, colonial rule. The film remains timeless, not least because of recent calls for the decolonisation of Russia and a re-assessment of Russian and Soviet imperialism in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this war, Nenets and other indigenous groups within Russia such as Buryats, Tyvans, Kalmyks, Chukchis, and small-numbered peoples of Chukotka, are overrepresented amongst Russian casualties when compared to their population size. 

Yet the film is not only sociologically and historically significant, but a superlative work of narrative and cinematic poetry.  

The sung word provides a literal and figurative narrative structure to the film, via the manipulation of diegetic (that is, heard by characters in the film) and non-diegetic songs, complemented by realist cinematography that anchors the narrative.  

The first and last chapters, “Sacrifice” and “Lullaby,” feature diegetic songs from Nenets women. “Sacrifice” begins with documentary footage of reindeer sledding before cutting to a lonely tree adorned with reindeer antlers, complemented by a woman’s chanting. Nenets then move a reindeer into the frame for slaughter. After this slaughter in the tundra cold, they eat bits of its meat and drink warm blood from its body. They do not speak. Antlers of reindeer previously sacrificed sit atop the diverging branches of a tundra tree, alone and dark amidst the backdrop of endless white, a striking image, evoking years of tradition, an image which begins and ends the film itself. This is clearly a practice passed down through countless generations. 

Moving forward in time, the next three (“The Bride,” “An Independent Person,” and “God”) feature non-diegetic singing from the protagonists, as these monologues take place almost through the fourth wall, towards the viewer. Their lyrics are abstract, dreamlike. The performances are crooning and raw, frostbit in timbre and often desperate in tone. This singing is perhaps an evocation of Nenets epic singing, a folk tradition, and one which has touched on the relations of Nenets to imperial Russian and Soviet practices, aligning with the narrative focus on the subjugation of the Nenets people and their way of life. The abstract images evoked foreshadow the coming drama, whilst the actual dramatic action remains staunchly realist. 

The next chapters, “Enemies of the People,” and “Syako,” signal a narrative shift: their music is Soviet, played from a gramophone and from the village loudspeakers, respectively. “Enemies of the People” features a Russian woman singing along to the gramophone, whilst “Syako,” which shows a Nenets girl forced to attend school against her will, features only the blasting of Soviet songs from a de-personified loudspeaker. The connection between people and their songs has not only been usurped by Soviet culture, but no longer do any people actually sing. 

As for the film’s action, the five inner chapters follow Nenets characters forward in time from before the Russian revolution to after the Second World War, from the narrative perspective of Nenets themselves or those living in the Nenets home of the tundra. 

Slowly but surely, the activities and requirements of life imposed on the Nenets from outside appear, growing to a seemingly unstoppable force. Seizure is the main action of the Russian-cum-Soviet presence, embodied in the Russian man who takes in the young girl as a wife, against her will; in the Revolutionary Guards seizing a herder’s reindeer during de-kulakisation; in the derision of local police towards two Nenets veterans of the Great Patriotic War for lamenting dead comrades, but worst of all praying, underneath a statue of Lenin; and not least in the imposition of Russian names on Nenets children beginning their schooling. 

The last chapter, “Lullaby”, which lacks a preceding song but whose content is itself a song, shows a mother soothing her newborn baby boy. Juxtaposed against the end of the preceding “Syako,” where the Soviet World War II song “Katyusha” groans from the loudspeakers whilst a Nenets girl is dragged off to school, “Lullaby” brings us a song with words of calm (“Sleep, sleep child, your father will soon come and bring you a toy, […] your sisters will soon be here with toys for you”). The first song sung by a Nenets since “God,” and the last of the film, the directors’ choice of juxtaposing this mother’s soft words against the encroaching, overpowering narrative-capture symbolised by “Katusha” signals they want the viewer to reflect on how the Soviet state slowly at first, but then all at once, subsumed the fabric and sound of Nenets life. 

Yet the mother’s song shows the instrument of voice as narrative form, and as an instrument important to the Nenets, remains. The image of life anew seizes our attention, and while the mother sings, we go back to the film’s first image — the tree of antlers against a white backdrop. Still standing, or a memory? It is unclear. All the viewers can understand is that these folk traditions, despite headwinds of state, Party, Revolution, and war, remain somehow and somewhere.

Seven Songs from the Tundra (2000) was screened on 28 April as part of the 2025 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film. It will be available to stream on Klassiki, in the US and UK, until 22 May.