Platform for experimental and anthropological film,
sound, and landscape cinema.
sound, and landscape cinema.
People
Anastasia Lapsui &
Markku Lehmuskallio
Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio have been working as a collaborative filmmaking duo for over thirty years, producing portraits of the Nenets, Sami, and other Indigenous peoples in the Arctic Circle, and directing the first fiction film in the Nenets language. Their films explore themes of cultural memory, displacement, and the impact of modernisation on Indigenous communities. In an attempt to describe their style and approach, they coined the term “Fourth Cinema”, a combination of documentary and fiction which refers to the tradition of Latin American “Third Cinema” - a decolonial movement of the 1960s and ‘70s which rejected both Hollywood and European auteur-driven filmmaking.
Anastasia Lapsui was born in 1944 into a nomadic Nenets family in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in the north-west of Siberia. Before she started working as a filmmaker, she was a radio broadcaster in her home region. Markku Lehmuskallio was born in 1938 in Rauma, Finland; prior to filmmaking he was a forester, making instructional films for farmers learning how to plant pine seedlings. They met in 1992 on one of Markku’s expeditions in the Soviet Union and have collaborated ever since.