Karelia: International with Monument

Karelia: International with Monument explores the mysterious forests of a remote territory on the Finnish-Russian border, an idyllic setting where shamanic magic and the historical trauma of Stalin’s purges intersect. With his expressive, inquisitive camerawork and a deliriously idiosyncratic approach to montage, Andrés Duque (Oleg and the Rare Arts, Art of the Real 2016) observes local customs, plays with children in the woods, and follows the fraught efforts to commemorate the purges’ forgotten victims, creating a wild, hallucinatory portrait of a place that still bears the traces of ancient folkloric custom—and the wounds of the past.