Mam

Only twelve young people live in the village, and they are all unemployed. ‘Hang around a bit and drink is all you can do’, one of them says. Drinking is what the villagers are good at, the adults too; some even die from it. Four impressive chapters of MAM focus on an unknown and unloved remote corner of the world: the Komi-Permyak district in the Ural Mountains, where an indigenous language is spoken and peculiar traditions prevail. The often poor and badly educated villagers willingly accept the camera. They tell stories, sing songs and unfold their family histories. Although MAM does not depict life in this poor region of the Russian Federation too positively, at the same time it radiates an enormous affection for the geography, the rich folklore and a tough population of unusual characters. Filmmaker Anatoli Baluyev, from the district himself, dedicated MAM ‘to all the mothers that left us’. His own mother, whom he portrays in the film, passed away during the shoot. Mikhail Lermontov’s quotation which opens the film ‘I love my native land, but mine’s a strange land, truly’, undoubtedly represents the love with which Baluyev made it.