The camp. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.Almost a year ago, in March 2017, a conflict over a forest in Karelia that had long raged between local residents and entrepreneurs and the authorities finally drew to a close. Surprisingly, though, it was local residents and activists who triumphed in Sunsky Bor.
Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, recently hosted a screening of Extremists, a film by director Alexey Tikhomirov inspired by the struggle waged by the forest’s defenders. Though Tikhomirov insisted during a presentation of his film that he’d made a “good-natured movie”, this was grasped neither by the organisers of the ArtDocFest documentary festival, who paired Extremists with a film about Pussy Riot, nor by the festival audience, whose reaction to the story was brusque and aggressive. The audience in Petrozavodsk, however, proved capable of appreciating the film’s true worth.
“Now it comes across almost like a comedy,” murmurs Tatiana Romakhina, one of the film’s protagonists, as she listens to the terse yet weighty pronouncements of Vasily Diykov, the story’s leading man. “But what did this victory of ours cost us.”
