ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the documentary films about northern Siberia’s socio-economic, cultural, and ecological setting, with a focus on the visual representation of the ways in which oil production affects the traditional way of life. The documentary film Oil Field offers a space for thinking through complex questions about cultural and personal identity without necessarily providing simple answers. Oil Field focuses on those in middle age, and it shows its protagonists as active agents of change. The chapter aims to show how narratives about ecology and resources are conceptualized and represented in an ethnographic film featuring indigenous peoples living in the North. The presentation of northern ethnocultural communities in early Soviet films followed an ethnographic principle that focused on everyday practices and provided a powerful tool for visualizing diversity. The chapter describes the story and the production context of the film while focusing on the objective and subjective conditions in which the film was made as a visual record.
