Lettre de Sibérie

One of the first films by the French inventor of the cinematographic essay. An account of a journey to the Soviet Union, in which Marker loosely and sometimes even humorously portrays the Siberia of 1957 as a landscape between the Middle Ages and the 21st century, a country of contrasts, grand emotions and raw, earthly poetry. Incorporating various film sources, photographs, cartoons, news casts and landscapes in colour, black-and-white and sepia, he tells the history of Siberia in an associative style. From the Western-like gold-digger stories, via the cave dwellers in prehistoric times to the space industry of the Soviet Union and back. He shows every image a number of times: once to criticise the Soviet Union, once to applaud it, and once again to show it ‘like it is‘. By doing so, he demonstrates that nothing simply is like it is.