Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)

Purely Joyful Movie!

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

HAPPY PEOPLE is another sterling documentary from Werner Herzog, this time exploring rural life in Siberia. Herzog is my favourite documentary filmmaker so it's a natural that I'd enjoy this movie and it's just as good as the rest of his work. For much of the running time this film follows around trappers as they strive to survive in an inhospital landscape. There are stunning landscape shots and nature photography as well as animals, dogs, and handicrafts. We watch the trappers set their traps and build canoes and cabins while lengthy interviews with the wilderness people really get to the heart of the subject at hand. As is usual for Herzog, he takes a little-known subject and explores it in depth in a fascinating way.

Co-Directors Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog takes us to one of the harshest parts of the world partly inhibited by people – Siberian Taiga. Documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga invites to follow how lives of local fur-trappers are effected by the cycles of nature.Brisk spring, shortest summer and cold fall followed by forever lasting winter – the only rule created by Taiga. The only imposed rule otherwise truly free people equipped only with individual values have to follow. Self-sufficiency and seemingly primitive methods perfected hundreds of years ago are passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Trapping, skis making, canoe carving, food preparation or fishing are true traditions and legacy small community of 300 people wants to preserve."You can take everything from the man, everything, but you can't take his craft."Documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga resembles raw video footage and thus serves the purpose very well. Seemingly wintry demeanor so common to people from the North is warmed by intimate stories and confessions – dog that becomes a family member, unwritten code of hunting, respect for the past, timeless traditions, unconditional love for Taiga and overwhelming enormity of solitude."You see that everything is going forward as it should. It gives you a sense of job being done. And it is not you who are doing it, but you still feel a part of it."PopcornBanned.com

If you like Werner Herzog then this film won't disappoint. His style is simple, honest and transparent. He gives you a clear sense of the reality of what most people would perceive to be a harsh way of life in the Russian Taiga. We see humans who are connected to the cycles of nature, to the animals, the forest and to their traditions. There is a quiet wisdom and deep joy in this way of life and the film serves as a powerful contrast to virtually every other piece of media being made today. The film is like poem to a way of life that now seems like a distant dream. It is beautifully shot, with vignettes that look like they are living paintings; Russian characters from the time of Tolstoy or Dostoyevesky.

Solid and straightforward illumination of the ways in which a few fur-trappers live and work year-round in the Siberian Taiga.Starting in Spring, we follow the stoic men on their seasonal routines in the village of Bakhtia on the Yenisei river. The utterly unique sight and sound of that big old river thawing and moving and creaking under the warm sun is totally sublime. With the onset of summer, the villagers participate in a fishing frenzy while fending off massive swarms of mosquitoes by rubbing tar all over themselves, their kids and their dogs. As autumn brings torrential rains, the water level rises and the trappers anxiously begin boating their heavy supplies into the vast forest. They begin repairing their traditional traps scattered throughout the expanse while re-constructing their personal wooden huts, which they will use as shelters along their treks through the deep snow.Other than one hilarious moment showing an alternatively modern fishing method, most all preparations for the long and lonely winter of work in the wilderness are performed according to very old cultural traditions. The simple and skilled construction of skis, traps, canoes, and huts from natural materials is shown with a patient fascination that draws us into a culture uniquely connected to the earth.Herzog's narration adds insight and a quirky humor to this otherwise forthright film. His patent deadpan humor -- largely deriving in his over-enunciated German accent -- and his honest admiration of these self-reliant men living off the land in total freedom from materialism and bureaucracy is refreshing, even if a bit romanticized.