KARLOVY VARY: Czech director/writer Veronika Lišková is currently in postproduction with her long documentary, the Czech/Norwegian/Slovak coproduction.
Life of Ivanna Review: A Stark, Striking Portrait of a Tough Tundra Nomad Life of Ivanna Review: A Stark, Striking Portrait of a Tough Tundra Nomad
A magnetic 26-year-old mother of five compels attention and repels judgment in a rigorously realist snapshot of life in the Arctic tundra.
Jessica Kiang, provided by
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Running time: Running time: 80 MIN.
Courtesy of CPH:DOX
The film you expect from Renato Borrayo Serrano’s documentary study of a Nenets woman raising five young children in the Arctic tundra is, in a subtly momentous way, not the one Serrano delivers with the unflinching “Life of Ivanna.” When it has become almost an article of faith that the purpose of such ethnographic portraits is to create empathy with cultures and lifestyles entirely foreign to our own all of us chasing that little puff of serotonin we get from a reassuring, “deep down, we are all the same” moral it is perversely admirable to insist so proudly on a subject�