Silent Souls

Miron, who manages a paper mill, does not want to bury his wife Tanya. He wants to send her off the way the Merya did: take her to the place where they spent their honeymoon, burn her there, and give the ashes to the river. He brings a colleague with him, the photographer Aist. On the road he tells him the most intimate things about his marriage, because that is part of the rite too. Alexey Fedorchenko draws on the beliefs of the Merya, a Finnic people who lived on the upper Volga and dissolved into the Russians. How much of the ritual is genuine and how much is the invention of the writer Denis Osokin is an open question. Seventy-seven minutes, somewhere between a lament and a road film; it took the FIPRESCI prize and the cinematography award at Venice in 2010.