Item 74 of 97
059a / Kamchatka - LOST in TRANSITION
Movies
MOV7448-R__2006-06-10-AAC0001
Eyesharpener
Sony HVR-Z1E/Digi Beta
Divicam / Digi-Beta
23:47
2006-06-10
Krapivnaja, Kamchatka
Russland
Russian / English Edition
27.7.2005
Having arrived in Esso I told Sergey our driver to take us into the woods the next day. No arrangements were made and no people contacted to keep the trip as unprepared as possible. It was rainy season with moskitos in abundance as we made our way about 200km off roads through the deep forest of Kamchatka. The traveling eye soon enough caught on to some place that looked like Waiting for Godot in the middle of nowhere.
As I found out later, the problem was not that Godot never showed up, the opposite had happened: officials from Kozeretsk had come to wipe the village Krapivnaya of the map, erase its official records, registered the four houses of old Krapivnaya together with all the 15 people as House Nr.1.
But the Bureaucrats of Kozeretsk didn't leave at that. They also took away Yuri's ID card, property papers and his permit as a forester on the pretext that his garden was some feet to big.
Place of nettles, Krapivnaya the village was called, Absence of Paradise so to speak.
I did the first shots in the kitchenhouse of Galina,Yuri and Babushka Daria to the tunes of the Rolling Stones from the local radio station. Yuri the owner could have easily put an end to my endeavor. But on the contrary: he put hay in the doghouse to make his dog feel comfortable, because Yuri had a message. It was as if he had been waiting for this to happen. He took us deep inside his private world he had made for himself.
Without government support or subsidies of any kind, without interest free loans or other perks or benefits he was selfsufficient. A sample of ingenuity and skill, 10'000km from Moscow in the deep forest of Kamchatka, at the other end of Russia. Nothing would make him swap his pleasures of planting vegetables and baking his own bread for something better in the City as Galina his second wife would have liked. He had found true happiness in the place of nettles. Did it come from his knowledge, in particular from the order and harmony he was able to create daily in his life?
Yuri was mapping his paradise in the Village of Nettles sitting on one of the many arms of the River Krapivnaya: unspectacular, not just accessible, but something inside this world of long and boring winters as well as during the rainy weeks and myriads of moskitos in summertime.
Juerg Da Vaz
Having arrived in Esso I told Sergey our driver to take us into the woods the next day. No arrangements were made and no people contacted to keep the trip as unprepared as possible. It was rainy season with moskitos in abundance as we made our way about 200km off roads through the deep forest of Kamchatka. The traveling eye soon enough caught on to some place that looked like Waiting for Godot in the middle of nowhere.
As I found out later, the problem was not that Godot never showed up, the opposite had happened: officials from Kozeretsk had come to wipe the village Krapivnaya of the map, erase its official records, registered the four houses of old Krapivnaya together with all the 15 people as House Nr.1.
But the Bureaucrats of Kozeretsk didn't leave at that. They also took away Yuri's ID card, property papers and his permit as a forester on the pretext that his garden was some feet to big.
Place of nettles, Krapivnaya the village was called, Absence of Paradise so to speak.
I did the first shots in the kitchenhouse of Galina,Yuri and Babushka Daria to the tunes of the Rolling Stones from the local radio station. Yuri the owner could have easily put an end to my endeavor. But on the contrary: he put hay in the doghouse to make his dog feel comfortable, because Yuri had a message. It was as if he had been waiting for this to happen. He took us deep inside his private world he had made for himself.
Without government support or subsidies of any kind, without interest free loans or other perks or benefits he was selfsufficient. A sample of ingenuity and skill, 10'000km from Moscow in the deep forest of Kamchatka, at the other end of Russia. Nothing would make him swap his pleasures of planting vegetables and baking his own bread for something better in the City as Galina his second wife would have liked. He had found true happiness in the place of nettles. Did it come from his knowledge, in particular from the order and harmony he was able to create daily in his life?
Yuri was mapping his paradise in the Village of Nettles sitting on one of the many arms of the River Krapivnaya: unspectacular, not just accessible, but something inside this world of long and boring winters as well as during the rainy weeks and myriads of moskitos in summertime.
Juerg Da Vaz
