Varkled-Bodya (, 2012)

’Varkled-Bodya’ is a documentary fairy tale, a film about a far Udmurt village in Russia, whose inhabitants worship the ancient pagan gods - Inmar, Lud, Mu-Kylchin. They pray deep in the forest; they feed their gods with bread and butter; they hang the animal’s sculls on the trees. Their Great Temple is a small wooden house with no windows; it stays in the village for centuries. Varkled-Bodya is the last place in the world where this ancient Finno-Ugric religion is kept unchanged till nowadays. ’Varkled-Bodya’ is a direct cinema project with no narration or ’talking heads’ - just a pure reality with short subtitles in Robert Flaherty’s style. The shooting of this film lasted for more than a year. It is a deep dive into the parallel reality where the trees can talk and the earth stands on the horns of the black bull.