Curator and producer Irina Engelis, who spent many years leading the Yakut International Film Festival, said screenings of Yakut cinema in Europe have grown into a notable cultural project. According to her, the festival in Paris, held on September 19–26, has sold out for a second straight year and attracted viewers from across Europe, while this year the program also expanded to Berlin, where screenings were held at the Krokodil cinema.
Engelis said her earlier work at the Yakut International Film Festival gave a strong push to the development of Sakha cinema. It was then, she said, that Russian journalists and critics began paying closer attention to it, while the festival itself became a venue for professional networking, educational events, and a growing flow of visitors traveling to Yakutia specifically for film.
“A festival is a kind of modern olonkhosut, one that uses cinema to tell people about us: about the Sakha people, our traditions, and what matters to us,” Engelis said.
After leaving Russia in 2022, she settled in Riga and, lacking stable work, decided to focus on her own projects. At that point, Engelis said, French producer Emmanuelle Fossillon contacted her. With support from the French Institute, the first Yakut film festival at Paris’s L’Entrepôt was organized in 2024: travel for directors, accommodation, printed materials, and French subtitles were all covered.
According to the curator, the festival serves two purposes at once: introducing foreign audiences to Yakut cinema and supporting the Sakha diaspora. Screenings were attended not only by Parisians and French viewers, but also by people from Yakutia living across Europe, as well as visitors from the United States and Thailand. Engelis recalled that after one screening, a Sakha emigrant who had traveled from provincial France approached her to say he was overjoyed to hear and speak his native language in person for the first time in years.
She also stressed that it has become harder for Yakut directors to show their films abroad, which makes direct meetings with international audiences especially important. Festivalgoers saw, among other works, the films “Aita” and “Nuuccha”, both banned in Russia, and Engelis said the screenings help assert the distinct identity of Yakut cinema in the global context.
“Exoticization and generalization are what I am fighting against. Our cinema helps people understand not only Yakutia, but also something larger about Russia itself,” she said.
Engelis said the team plans to hold the festival in Paris again and is also considering screenings in Italy, Poland, the United States, and the countries of Northern Europe.