“Wooden People” – short film

Presented in 2012 by filmessay, an Italian organization distributing short films, Wooden People is a documentary film about a solitary man living in a Belarus village. He is its last resident, but has created a simulated world. From the film website:

“Mikalaj is an old man and the only inhabitant of a village in the biggest forest of Europe, Belavezhskaya Pushcha. This place was teeming with life once, but since then all the other people have either left for the city or died. What depresses Mikalaj is not merely solitude. It is very hard for him to deal with the utter lifestyle and mentality. So he resurrected his country folk. He made hundreds of wooden figures representing all possible kinds of farm work and all the stages of human life. His small characters work, love, marry, give birth, divorce, drink and die. The tiny society has even a nuclear bomb that threatens the very existence of a miniature mankind. That is how Mikalaj lives: working in the field like his ancestors did and talking to his little men.”

URLs: (article) https://boingboing.net/2021/07/31/watch-this-documentary-about-a-villages-sole-inhabitant.html; video: https://vimeo.com/50674051.