Busan Film Fest offers rare chance to explore cinema from Yakutia

Last week, South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) announced that it will screen a special showcase of films from Russia’s far eastern Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia — a rare opportunity to discover the cinema of Russia’s largest federal subject, sparsely populated and dominated by tundra and taiga.

According to a report by The Hollywood Reporter, the 22nd edition of BIFF will showcase seven feature-length films and five shorts in a dedicated section of the festival titled “Sakha Cinema: World of Magical Nature and Myth”, which will cast a look back at the past 30 years of film from the region and will include such work as Mother by Alexey Romanov, a pioneering work of Sakha cinema. Recent years have seen something of a bloom in regional Russian filmmaking, with Yakutia one of the federal republics at heart of the phenomenon.

See the full list of films to be screened here. Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) will run from 12 — 21 October. Find out more here.