Clément Cogitore
France, Finland | 2017 | 49 min
Language : Russian
Subtitles : English, French
In the darkest depths of the Siberian taiga, the Braguine and Kiline families live in self-sufficiency, separated by a fence that crosses their village. The two clans, who are on bad terms for reasons that are as dark as the forest that surrounds them, hate each other and refuse to speak to one another. A flamboyant documentary tale haunted by the myth of lost paradise.
“Braguino” is the name of a community secluded in the darkest depths of the Siberian taiga. The Braguine and Kiline clans live there in self-sufficiency, separated by a fence that crosses their village: the two families, estranged for reasons that are as dark as the forest that surrounds them, hate each other and refuse to speak to one another. Shot four years after the first location scouting, Clément Cogitore’s film weaves this conflict of territory far from everything, in the style of a cruel tale, seen, among others, from the perspective of children, who play a significant role in the narrative. The editing works on two registers, oscillating between almost anthropological scenes in which what occurs in the frame is captured in its duration and experienced in real time (killing and cutting up bears, dropping the children off on their islands to protect them from wild animals, etc.), and other more fragmentary and elliptical sequences. The precision of the sound design and the construction of dreamlike images make Braguino drift towards a parable. These borders of the so-called civilised world witness the re-enactment of a utopian dream and the myth of paradise lost.
Emmanuel Chicon