Two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tamara Kotevska (“Honeyland”), whose latest feature, “The Tale of Silyan,” premieres at the Venice Film Festival, is readying her next project, a Siberia-lensed documentary set in the world of the indigenous Dolgan people. The director will be pitching it this week at the Venice Gap-Financing Market, which takes place Aug. 29 – 31.
“The Mammoths That Escaped the Kingdom of Erlik Khan” follows Vladik, a young reindeer hunter raised in the harsh, punishing landscape of the Yakut Tundra, who stands at a crossroads: whether to carry on the traditional ways he’s inherited from his father, Roma, or to join the hunters pursuing a more modern, capitalist lifestyle by excavating and selling the buried tusks of the extinct woolly mammoth.
Rooted in the traditional beliefs of the Dolgan people, Roma counsels his son to heed the warnings of their ancestors, who considered it a bad omen to unearth the ancient mammoth remains buried in the Siberian permafrost. But Vladik is driven instead by the temptation of the lucrative tusk trade, setting off on a journey that will come with an uncertain cost to his family, heritage and the fragile ecosystem of the Tundra.
“The Mammoths That Escaped the Kingdom of Erlik Khan” is produced by Lisbon-based Alecrim Vagabundo, Denmark’s Real Lava, L.A.- and London-based outfit The Corner Shop, and Kotevska and Dakar’s production company Ciconia Film. The producers are Enrico Saraiva, Sigrid Dyaker, Anna Hashimi, Harry Vaughn, Tamara Kotevska and Jean Dakar.
Pic marks the latest from the North Macedonian Kotevska, who broke out with the arresting documentary feature debut “Honeyland,” co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov, which won three awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and received two Academy Award nominations in 2020 for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature. Her solo debut, “The Walk,” premiered at DOC NYC in 2023 before screening at festivals including CPH:DOX.
It was during the production of that film that Kotevska met “Mammoths” co-writer and cinematographer Jean Dakar, on the border between Syria and Turkey. “The Walk” tells the story of a young Syrian refugee, Asil, who processes her trauma through a giant puppet symbolizing the millions of children displaced by war. Over the course of 18 months, Kotevska and Dakar — working as DoP — followed Asil as she and her puppet traveled across Europe, traversing several thousand miles on foot from Turkey all the way to the English Channel.
The duo developed a strong working relationship along the way and found they shared “very similar ideas about how we liked to tell stories and shoot films,” according to Dakar. Their collaboration on “Mammoths” began with photographer Jimmy Nelson’s landmark book “Before They Passed Away,” which introduced them to the mammoth tusk hunters of Siberia, a community clinging to its traditions despite the rapid encroachment of the modern world.
The Dolgan continue to survive in Siberia as reindeer herders.
Courtesy of Jean Dakar/Tamara Kotevska
Their research eventually led them to a British fixer married to a Dolgan woman from the remote Russian republic of Sakha, on the threshold of the Arctic Circle. On the filmmakers’ first visit last summer, it took four full days for the duo to travel from Macedonia to Sakha, flying via Istanbul, Moscow and Yakutsk and arriving at the northernmost airport on the map — what Dakar described as “a runway of dirt and shipping containers.” There they traveled by single-prop plane into the heart of the Tundra, then by rubber dinghy up the frigid Anabar River until they reached the remote Dolgan village of Yurunkhaya.
From there they continued onward by quad bike, further north, finally arriving at the place where the herders lived with their reindeers in temporary settlements made up of baloks, the Dolgan’s traditional, portable log cabins that are covered in reindeer skins and built on sleds for mobility. For one month they lived among the indigenous tribe in the Yakut Tundra, eating reindeer meat and sleeping under a summer sky whose endless light Kotevska compared to being “on a different planet.”
When they return at the end of November to continue shooting, “the landscape is going to completely change,” said Dakar. “It’s going to be white, and it’s going to be very, very cold.” The filmmakers have been traveling to Denmark for what Dakar described as “basic training on how to do basic things in temperatures of -40, -50 degrees,” cold so extreme that simply breaking a sweat can be life-threatening. They’ll have to relearn “how to walk, how to breathe,” alongside the more technical questions of how to film and keep their camera equipment safe. “We just need to rethink everything,” said Dakar, though the most important survival strategy will be “sticking to whatever the Dolgan tell us to do.”
“Mammoths” pits the ancient indigenous knowledge of the Dolgan community, whose way of life has traditionally revolved around reindeer herding and fishing, against the modern forces of capitalism and the lucrative trade in mammoth tusks, with all the temptations that go along with it for a younger generation.
As divisions grow within the community, the choice that the young reindeer herder Vladik must make becomes emblematic of the larger struggle for the Dolgan to resist those modernizing forces, though Kotevska said that the film is ultimately “a story of redemption.”
The filmmakers in the Yakut Tundra
Courtesy of Jean Dakar/Tamara Kotevska
“Mammoths” is in keeping with the themes that have preoccupied Kotevska throughout her young career, investigating the ways in which “the modern world and capitalism are modifying our lives and worlds and changing them, and destroying the knowledge that’s actually necessary for our survival.” It’s the reason she continues to document indigenous communities struggling to preserve their old ways of life.
“I find documentaries to be a legacy,” Kotevska said. “I love documentaries because this is the legacy, the treasure of this world that must not be forgotten. This is the archive of the world. This is what documentaries are.
“For me to tell the stories of the cultures that are about to die out is a personal passion,” she continued, “and a personal drive to keep doing documentaries [is why I] keep doing this kind of stories.”
