2012 / digital / 106min. / Russia
　　
Comprised of 23 vignettes illuminating the pagan-influenced mores of western Russia’s Meadow Mari, the latest film from director Alexey Fedorchenko (SILENT SOULS) is a beguiling, painterly portrait of a culture driven by a ritualistic appreciation of female beauty and feminine sexuality.
　
Pagan folklore is alive amongst the Meadow Mari, a Finno-Ugric ethnic group in western Russia. Alexey Fedorchenko’s latest film comprises twenty-three vignettes that centre on the sexual lives of a collection of Mari women, recreating an idiosyncratic world of magical realism in which female fertility, beauty, and, ultimately, happiness is the driving force.
　
In CELESTIAL WIVES OF THE MEADOW MARI, all the women’s names begin with the letter O. There’s Okanay Oshanyak, whose aunt rubs her naked body in order to help its development. There’s Oshtylech, who picks through a bucket of phallic mushrooms in order to help select her ideal husband. And Onya, who, at the advice of a friend, smells her husband’s private parts to confirm her suspicion of his infidelity. Each story takes an endearing approach to love and sexuality as it exists within Mari culture. But the film does not shy away from the folklore’s darker undertones: witness the tragic consequence of Oropti succumbing to a forest spirit’s curse, or preteen Ormarche witnessing the older girls perform a naked dance at the whim of male ghosts. These fables exalt femininity, and the power it holds within — and beyond — Mari customs.
　
Collaborating once more with scriptwriter Denis Osokin, Fedorchenko continues his concern with the fading Mari culture. Abandoning the resigned and elegiac approach of 2010’s SILENT SOULS, here he employs an uplifting colour palette of rich blues, and casts pale-skinned actresses (both professional and non-) to deliver his painterly tableaux of rural life untouched by secular modernity. At times grotesque, but never vilifying, the film is a tender, beguiling portrait of a culture preserved within its folklore, inviting us to celebrate it alongside the Mari.
　

Aleksey FEDORCHENKO

Born in 1966 in Sol-Iletsk, in the Siberian region of Orenburg, he moved to Yekaterinburg where he still lives. After studying engineering, he graduated in dramaturgy at the VGIK (Russian State University of Cinematography). Since 2004, he is the founder, director, producer, and supervisor of “Kinokompaniya 29-e Fevralya”. For his debut feature film, FIRST ON THE MOON, Fedorchenko won the Orizzonti Doc Award at the 62nd Venice International Film Festival, returning in 2010 with OVSYANKI, a meditative poetic story in which the characters, members of the Finno-Ugric ethnic group, have an almost intimate relation with the earth and the water. The film won the Osella award for Best Photography while the international critics awarded it the FIPRESCI prize. Fedorchenko’s cinema explores the traditions of populations that still resist the predominance of the prevailing culture. OVSYANKI also won prizes at the film festivals in Abu Dhabi, Mar del Plata, and Vladivostock. In 2012, at the Festival “Vivat kino Rossii”, Fedorchenko won the special jury prize for his short film, CHETVERTOE IZMERENIE. That same year, he came to the Rome Film Festival to present CELESTIAL WIVES OF THE MEADOW MARI, a sort of Decameron suspended between magic and realism, consisting of twenty-three short stories about the women of the Mari people. The following year the film was shown in the Vanguard section at the Toronto International Film Festival and was a prizewinner at the Festival of Breslavia. His latest film is ANGELS OF REVOLUTION(14).
　

Schedule

TOKYO Park tower：5/6 11:30 Program M
KYOTO：5/18 18:50 Program M
YOKOHAMA：5/30 11:30 Program M