British film director Rebecca Marshall is producing a film about the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykov, whose life and circumstances are familiar to readers of this blog. A Guardian article titled “Stalin, Siberia and salt: Russian recluse’s life story made into film” summarizes Agafia’s life and indicates details about the film:
When British film director Rebecca Marshall first heard about Lykova’s life, she was gripped. “For two years I couldn’t stop thinking about this incredible woman surviving alone in the Siberian wilderness. It seemed like both a paradise away from our world of mass communication, and a nightmare of loneliness.”
She said the reality of Lykova’s circumstances had surprised her. “When I finally met Agafia, what surprised me was that rather than feeling like a primitive situation, it felt like arriving in the future – to a world with no technology, the vast forest littered with discarded space junk. It is an incredible and beautiful place.”
The documentary, The Forest in Me, is intended as “a meditation on the nature of individual human identity”, she says.
Marshall, along with the director of photography, Sarah Cunningham, and Ukrainian-born assistant director, Elena Andreicheva, raised more than £14,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to get the project off the ground and received funding from Creative Europe.
URL: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/12/russia-recluse-siberia-stalin-agafia-lykova-documentary; http://rbth.com/politics_and_society/society/2015/11/03/uk_film_to_profile_wilderness_woman_in_Siberia_536845
Film trailer: http://rebeccaemarshall.com/the-forest-in-me/
