Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

A documentary following a year in a Siberian village. Bakhta sits on the Yenisei river and has no road. In winter it can only be reached when the river freezes. The trappers who live there spend most of the year alone in the forest. The film is divided into four seasons. In spring a boat is built, in summer traps are prepared, in autumn the forest cabins are repaired, and in winter the sable trapping begins. What the narrative is interested in is method. How a trap is set, how a boat is cut from a tree, how you work with a dog, how snowshoes are made; all of it is shown in detail. Every material comes out of the forest. The footage belongs to a long documentary made for Russian television. Werner Herzog saw the material, re-edited it and turned it into a ninety-minute film with his own narration. Herzog's interest is plain: people almost entirely separated from modern life, who make their own tools and depend on nobody. A calm and instructive production for anyone who likes documentary and stories of living in the wild. For a viewer expecting a dramatic narrative, the film builds no plot and consists entirely of daily work.