Caroline Damiens’s A Siberian History of Soviet Film offers an original, decentered perspective on Soviet film history. The book applies neither a familiar regional focus (Soviet cinema in Siberia) nor a representational analysis of ethnic minorities on film (Siberia in Soviet cinema), rather, it reverses spatial hierarchies by suggesting an altogether different optic, foregrounding the indigenous contributors both on and off screen in the 1920–80s. By shifting attention from the Moscow-centric perspective, Damiens focuses on films made for cinema and TV about and with national minorities of Siberia and the North. In her book, “Siberia” is loosely equated with the North, and both terms are used in a complementary way throughout her study.

The ambition of the book is to move beyond the analytical optics of “ethnographic” cinema, refusing the perpetuate its Othering logic. Damiens’s study offers a productive shift away from equalizing “Soviet” with “Russian” cinema and critically explores Soviet ethnographic classifications. At the monograph’s center is the question how “indigenous people related to the manufacture of their images on the screen” (2), which is approached through the notion of “visual sovereignty.” The concept of “manufacture” implies both physical (involvement in production) and symbolic (visual representation on screen) construction.

Damiens sets up a decolonial framework to study the primary materials “against the grain.” Surveying film and non-film archives, contemporary press, and unpublished sources, she discovers the marginalized presence of indigenous contributors among screenwriters, cast, projectionists, technicians, guides, translators, and production assistants. The reversal of perspective is helped by the concept of “lucha (lutsa),” designating an indigenous perspective on a non-indigenous, “white,” and urban population involved in the process of filmmaking (4). Damiens argues that despite the pronounced anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist self-positioning, Soviet filmmaking practices remained entangled with the European epistemic logic of progress and perception of civilizational superiority.

Another concept Damiens introduces is that of “ethnografictions,” which she locates “at the intersection between ethnographic films, expeditionary films, and dramatized fiction” (25). The story of emergence and transformation of this genre explores the dynamic relations of “fiction” and “documentary” modalities. The author identifies an important threshold in the late 1930s, when filmmakers moved away from working with indigenous cast and began to involve professional actors in leading roles (45).

The book presents three periods of production and reception of Soviet cinematic images of ethnic alterity. The introduction and Ch. 1 review the debates on post- and de-coloniality and its applicability to the Soviet history, and the legacy of post-Enlightenment epistemological eurocentrism in Soviet cinema. Part One zooms on the expedition films produced in 1926–35, among them A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Forest People (1928), Through the Ussuri Area (1928), Reindeer Rider (1929), and Igdenbu (1930), delving into the active experiments with “ethnografictions,” which combined dramatized plots with location filming and non-professional, typage casts.

Part Two looks at the Soviet discourse on modernity through casting and representation from mid-1930s to the late-1970s. Chapter 3 covers the Stalinist era’s gradual transformation of ethnografictions through the replacement of amateur indigenous actors by professional ones of different nationalities. Chapter 4 addresses the post-Stalinist period and zooms in on the Soviet-Japanese co-produced Dersu Uzala (1975) and other films, exploring the emergence of “ecological” indigenous characters who challenge the progressivist, linear discourse of externally-driven modernity.

Part Three introduces Soviet television practices from the late 1960s-early 1980s and looks at the resurgence of possibilities for indigenous artists. Chapter 5 explores television as a medium and analyzes Anatolii Nitochkin’s Tymancha’s Friend (1969), the first film in the Evenk language and with non-professional Evenk actors shot on location. Its cast included Zinaida Pikunova, an official in the local Party committee at the time, whose involvement triggered her interest in the indigenous revivalist movement. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the Chukchi screenwriter Iurii Rytkheu, a founding figure of “fourth cinema” in the USSR, and the films based on his scripts—The Most Beautiful Ships (1972), Tracking the Wolverine (1978), and When the Whales Leave (1981). The book is not limited to the analysis of cinematographic representations, but reconstructs their broader production, distribution, and reception contexts.

Dissociating the production process from the singular role of the director and at the same time identifying specific structural silences sensitizes the reader to the critical treatment of archival sources. A methodological awareness of the fragmented and incomplete nature of the archives and of the embedded hierarchies they carry requires special sensitivities not only from the researcher, but from the reader as well, who is challenged to think through the need to revisit the very foundations of writing about the Soviet period.

The book is Adrian Morfee’s translation of Damiens’s French-language monograph Fabriquer la Sibérie soviétique à l’écran (2023). Despite occasional terminological discrepancies with established English concepts (“expeditionary” rather than “expedition” cinema, cinematographic “creatures” rather than characters, or back-projection in place of rear projection), the availability of the book in English makes it accessible to new reading audiences. The book will be of interest to the readers in the fields of cinema and cultural studies, and offer an important comparative perspective to scholars of decoloniality in film and media history. Sixty pages of notes offer supplementary intellectual nourishment for those willing to immerse themselves into additional details, comments on the primary sources, and period debates.