Sense of independence–what is it for you and me? Creating a nation outside of a state–is that possible? Did we fail? What am I inhabiting? What inhabits me? 

Taking place in the Yakutian Arctic, or the Republic of Sakha Yakutia, filmmaker Svetlana Romanova graciously invites the audience into her line of inquiry that vitally challenges settler narratives wholly linked to the popular imagination of the Arctic regions. Voyage of Jeanette is an experimental, discursive essay film that navigates western ontologies and its myths of discovery alongside Yakutian realities.

The film is composed of a tightly woven compilation of personal notes, both verbal and visual, posing questions that reposition moving image culture’s relationship to creation narratives and its place in image production overall. Svetlana thus foregrounds the influence that modes of storytelling have on one’s perception as well as understanding their own place in officially documented histories, pre-defined heritage and familial memory.

Svetlana has also critiqued representations of the Arctic through writing. In her essay, Visual Representation of Indigenous Peoples: Towards the Creation of a Self-Directed Visual Culture, she proposes that the Arctics have been presented as open, barren lands of ice and snow are inaccurate, and so erase historically migratory populations and their culture from their homelands. Such images not only influence the global settler imagination, but also that of contemporary Indigenous populations from those very regions. As she writes:

This scenario has established images as the currency through which commodification of certain socioeconomic norms are estimated and are used as weapons to mold social identities in favor of commerce to conque[r] expansive territories…This is dictated not only by the lack of prospects in traditional industries (low income, harsh labor and etc.) but also accelerated through the generated myth. Myth here being the representation of someone’s reality through the prism of capitalism. Accessibility of recent technological advancements (phones, cameras, computers, etc.) have created an environment where transmitters of this myth have become an extension of our bodies. [1]

Voyage of Jeanette counters the colonial and capitalist frameworks of the Arctic as a singular entity, empty and there for the taking. Instead, it presents the bodies, lifeways, and images created by those who have called the Arctics home for time immemorial. In doing so, Svetlana reseeds and repopulates depictions of the Arctics in the global, collective memory.

Please join us for a conversation with Svetlana Romanova following the screening. 

1. Svetlana Romanova, “Visual Representation of Indigenous Peoples: Towards the Creation of a Self-Directed Visual Culture,” @GI_weltweit, October 2021, https://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/en/kul/kue/rbc/tra/22402759.html.