The formation and history of Lake Baikal in Siberia are re-imagined with hand-made animation, featuring the voice of a Buryat woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat-Mongolian language.

Director's Statement

The formation and history of Lake Baikal in Siberia are reimagined, featuring the voice of a Buryat woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat-Mongolian language. The vocabularies from the voice recording of the Buryat woman re-vitalize the spiritual significance of the terrain and landscape associated with her mother tongue. The sharp decline in Buryat language proficiency in the local region could be linked to the ongoing colonial reality since three hundred years ago as well as the post-Soviet Russian policies in education. The region has been inaccessible because of the pandemic and currently the Russia-Ukraine war, the film re-imagines and re-enacts the landscape with various tangible and tactile materials gathered from my daily life in Germany, almost 7000 km away from Lake Baikal.

Category: Animation.
Themes: Language, Indigenous, Women, World Cinema.