Passions For The Mammoth

A documentary about the 1999 discovery of a Mastodon skeleton in a Hyde Park backyard.

After 20 years of wandering taiga weather stations searching for a suitable place for having a life, Nataliya and Yuri Usovy settled on Olkhon island, on a remote weather station. They thought to find happiness here.

Captured by the Red Army during World War II, Hungarian soldier András Toma was admitted to a Soviet psychiatric hospital. After disappearing from prisoner-of-war records, he was presumed dead in Hungary. Because his name was incorrectly recorded in medical documents and he spoke only Hungarian—mistaken by staff for incoherent speech—Toma spent decades misunderstood and isolated in the institution. Fifty-three years later, a visiting Slovak doctor recognised his language, triggering an investigation by Hungarian authorities. Toma was repatriated in 2000, believed to be the last prisoner of war from World War II to return home.

St. Petersburg, Russia, December 30th, 1916. Grigori Rasputin is assassinated. The story of the humble peasant who became the most influential adviser to czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of the last czar, Nicholas II Romanov.

After 20 years of living in Berlin, the director Olga Delane goes back to her roots in a small Siberian village, where she is confronted with traditional views of relationships, life and love. The man is the master in the home; the woman’s task is to beget children and take care of the household (and everything else, too). Siberian Love provides unrivaled insights into the (love) life of a Siberian village and seeks the truth around the universal value of traditional relationships.

Le monde perdu des mammouths

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 450 miles from the nearest village, live two families : the Braguines and the Kilines. Not a single road leads there. A long trip on the Ienissei River, first by boat, then by helicopter, is the only way to reach Braguino. Self-sufficient, both families live there according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to speak. In the river sits an island, where another community is being built : that of the children. Free, unpredictable, wild. Stemming from the fear of the other, that of wild beasts, and the joy procured by the immensity of the forest, unravels a cruel tale in which tensions and fear give shape to the geography of an ancestral conflict.

Imagine one of the most remote wildernesses in the world. Granddaughter Masha and Vladimir, the protagonists of this story from Central Siberia try the impossible to keep their nomadic traditions alive.

In 1829 the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt attempted a russian-siberian expedition. Humboldt travelled to obtain a clear view of nature, people and life in this immense country. 2019 naturalists and humanists attempted a transdisciplinary expedition on the trails of Humboldt. To capture the events various cameras were taken along. A non-chronological narration.

A window into Russia, unknown to Western man, and even to many Russians. "Russia - the largest country in the world. In many of its parts, it remains unknown world full of wonders. Let the world and will continue for the generations that come after us".

In the Darhat valley in northern Mongolia, the horses of nomadic tribes are stolen by bandits who then sell them to Russian slaughterhouses. Shukhert, a brave horseman, relentlessly pursues them through the Mongolian taiga, bordering Siberia.

A well-preserved mammoth carcass is found in the remote New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean, opening up the possibility of a world-changing “Jurassic Park” moment in genetics.

About 3 thousand years ago, apparently due to climate change, musk oxen in Eurasia became completely extinct. They remained only in hard-to-reach places in North America and Greenland. To return the musk oxen to their historical homeland, scientists decided to conduct an experiment and brought 30 musk oxen to Taimyr. To find out how the experiment went, 35 years later we set off on a long trip to Taimyr and there we try to meet musk oxen.

Really strange documentary of Wheeler Dixon production quality on the Tunguska Event and the possibility of it happening again causing an apocalypse (basically a meteor scare film) sprinkled with UFO conspiracy kooks, and other 'professionals', riddled with stock footage of all kinds, freaky moog music and sound fx, a Dr. Who rip-off end theme, Victor Buono as Homer the Archivist, a philosophical history recorder in a space ship with a HAL 9000 type talking computer named Ino, there's also another space ship with Egyptian looking aliens girls with pasties and see-thru blouses.

This story began in the seventies. Then the American ornithologist George Archibald turned to Soviet scientists led by Vladimir Flint with a proposal to cooperate in the protection of the white Siberian crane. This species was little studied and was considered endangered. Since then, we know much more about white cranes. Now on Earth there are two disparate populations of Siberian Cranes. One is East Siberian. These birds nest in the north of Yakutia and migrate to China. There are more than three thousand of them, and in the near future they are not threatened with extinction. A few thousand kilometers away, another population of Siberian Cranes lives. They nest in the lower reaches of the Ob, and fly to India or Iran for the winter. There are only twenty of them left. This film is about how people are trying to save this West Siberian branch of white cranes.

In 2021, an extreme heatwave gave rise to huge wildfires in the vast subarctic forests of Sakha, a northeastern republic in Siberia. The village of Shologon lies in this taiga landscape, shrouded in orange smoke and black ash. The forest is burning and the flames are approaching fast.

Captain Kleinschmidt leads an expedition sponsored by the Carnegie Museum to the arctic regions of Alaska and Siberia to study the natives and the animal life.

At 7:14 am on 30 June 1908, the largest explosion recorded in human history to date reverberated throughout our planet. The force of the explosion was two thousand times that of the Hiroshima bomb. A woodland area the size of Luxembourg was eradicated in the Siberian taiga. This incident is recorded in history books as the Tunguska catastrophe. To this day, internationally renowned scientists of various disciplines argue about the causes of this disastrous explosion. The documentary discusses the latest and most controversial insights of these leading scientists. It identifies the reasons why Tunguska has evolved into a phenomenon and points out the curious results produced by this mythical event in culture and economy.

In Northern Russia, a few dozen people still live in their traditional houses surrounded by water, stone, and sand. Cut off from vital infrastructure, almost forgotten by regional governance, these people have to cope with their everyday struggles.

A scientist wants to recover some mammoth DNA to clone a live mammoth. So he finds a buried mammoth in the vast, rock hard permafrost of Siberia, digs it out in the middle of a blizzard and flies it home. Of course he needed a little help. So he befriended an arctic nomad who knows ever rill, rock, pond and stream in the entire region. As background to the quest, National Geographic relates the migratory history of the mammoth family.