Ville Haapasalo in Mari-El

Last Sunday, I discovered this charming TV series by Ville Haapasalo, a Finnish actor who has become quite a celebrity in Russia. "Suomensukuiset 30 päivässä" (The Finnic Relatives in 30 Days) documents his travels along the Volga and around the Ural Mountains in search for the Finno-Ugric minorities in this area of the Russian Federation. The first episode started in Kazan, the Republic of Tatarstan, and continued to a village in Mari El, also a federal republic but with considerably less cultural power for the minority people whose name it bears.

Visiting the holy grove - moving stories and memorable faces of the Mari people.

The Mari identity builds on the Mari language and the unique, syncretist Mari religion. 43.9 % of the Mari El population identifies as Mari, but only 6 % of the population practices the traditional religion. Ville Haapasalo is invited to witness and participate in Mari rituals - the baptism of a baby and a visit to a holy grove. Trees are the spiritual bridge between deities of the Earth and the Sky for the Mari. They convey prayers and energy to the worshiper. For Finnish-speakers, it is interesting to note that the Mari word for deity is jumo - related to the Finnish word jumala.

 A fuzzy doggy joins Ville's spontaneous breakfast in a park in Yoshkar-Ola.

Filming was only allowed at the market in the presence of this handsome guard and a friendly guide.

I don't know if this dried apricot merchant is a local or a Central Asian, but he looks cute. Ville was ecstatic about the apricots but was embarrassed when the guide insisted on paying. "We come from a capitalist country!" Nice try, Ville.

Young men at the market. There were a lot of striking smiles in this programme.

More sweet smiles. In the park, Ville discussed the future of the Mari language with the theater director Vasily. Do the young people speak Mari? With theater productions and folk dance at the university, Mari cultural workers try to revitalize interest in their cultural heritage.

 

 

 

 

A dance troupe at the university.

Those smiles again!

The Mari dances were interesting - while the music often reminds of Tatar folk music, the steps look completely different in my eyes (and the costumes of course). It also seems that while dancing in pairs, the dancers do not hesitate to wrap their arm around the partner's waist ;) But of course there are many local differences and I suggest to look around on YouTube for a better idea of Mari folk dances. Like here or here... (with some modern music too)

The archers' dance was fascinating.

Marij, marij, kuš kajet? Mari, Mari, where are you going? I was honestly moved to tears many times during this programme. Ville will be continuing his travel, too - in the next episode he will visit Udmurtia and meet the famous grannies, Buranovskiye Babushki, who put up a tough but heartwarming fight against the overproduced pop starlets of the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku last year. Better have your hankies ready!

Ville Haapasalo in Kazan

Ville Haapasalo is a popular actor in Russia. In Finland, he has recently become famous for his TV documentaries about the Silk Road and the states that became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now Finnish television has started to show a new series about the Finno-Ugric minorities in the Russian Federation. Today, I am watching the first episode of "Suomensukuiset 30 päivässä" (The Finnic Relatives in 30 Days - more exactly, the series focuses on the Mari, the Erzya and Moksha, the Komi, the Udmurt, the Khanty and Mansi).

Haapasalo tries very hard to act like an ordinary ignorant guy, but the schedule of the series shows that somebody has been doing some proper research. As the starting point for his journey, he chooses Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, and devotes much time to the special cultural and religious mix of the thousand-year-old city. It is a necessary historical lesson for the Finnish audience who may not know about the role of Islam in Russian history, and the close contacts between the speakers of Finno-Ugric and Turko-Tatar languages. In fact, their fate has often been intertwined - their cultures have mixed with each other as much as with the Slavic-speakers; languages and religions have been switched back and forth. But this is a long story, and in this post, I will only show some entertaining screencaps, which do not reflect the full scope of the first episode.

Ville Haapasalo meets an imam in Kazan, who reminds us of the necessity to teach children not to discriminate people according to race, nationality or religion. This interesting conversation contrasts a conflict-torn Europe with a harmonious Tatarstan - I won't go into much more detail about the complicated reality behind those images, but there are certainly lessons to be learned from the Tatar balancing act.

Talking about the many nationalities living and working in Kazan: "Everyone can do something for their nation." Farid is Ville's guide in Kazan. He is an event organizer and a perfect diplomat, a Tatar in other words ;)

 

Boys cheering for the football club Rubin Kazan. 

Ville also visits a stable with the "fastest horses of the world". Many of them seem to be gifts to the former premier of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiyev. The horses have their own solarium... 

The akhal-teke Nurik is a gift from Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan. He refuses to do tricks on command...

Random doggy (for Tinet). 

One problem with this programme is that we don't learn the names of a lot of important people whom Haapasalo interviews. Here are two hobby ethnographers who collect folklore among the Mari people and publish their results on their own website, for the interest of the general public, as Ville himself notes. So why not make it available for us?

One of the ethnographers looks a lot like Rudolf Nureyev in profile, only with dark hair. He also skipped the glass of vodka that came with the dinner. I wonder if he is Tatar? Of course, they both could be - many Tatars enjoy vodka, too...

This was only half of the programme, but if you live in Finland you can watch the whole thing here.

Eduard Ondar

Tuvan actor Eduard Ondar recently visited Kazan during the all-Turkic Nauruz festival. Ondar starred in Yakut director Andrei Borisov's epic movie By the Will of Chingis Khan (2009), and his next great project is a Kazakh production where he plays a Dzungarian warlord. In an interview for Tuvinskaya Pravda, Ondar tells about the unexpected troubles that the role of the greatest warlord in Asian history brought him:

"Before, in my time off, just like most of my colleagues, I used to moonlight as a cab driver with my ancient Honda, to make a few extra kopeks. Genghis Khaan deprived me of this possibility. One day some elderly passenger that I was driving somewhere even complained to my bosses – how is this possible, the Khan himself, and he has sunk to driving a riksha? That is unsuitable."

See also: Preview of the new Kazakh movie.

Charles Bronson TV ad

Our perennial favourite Charles Bronson (who probably deserves his own tag soon, exhibit #1 and #2) on Japanese TV, advertising nothing less than MAN DOM. The original poster claims that this was made around 1970, and we are inclined to believe them.

Oh yeah... Happy birthday, Mum!

Ran Danker, hotness from Israel

*Sorry if this text is totally incoherent, but not only is it 4 AM, but my brain is also for the most part incapacitated by the dazzling handsomeness of Ran Danker, 26 years old.*

Eyes Wide Open is a film about the Ultra-Orthodox family father Aaron (Zohar Strauss), who hires the homeless Yeshiva student Ezri (Ran Danker) to work as an apprentice in his butcher's shop. Their friendship develops into an emotional and sexual relationship, but they are being closely watched by their community, and the religious authorities, their fellow believers and the "purity police" will absolutely not tolerate anything of the like.

Ezri, who "scribbles a bit" in his free time, offers to draw Aaron's portrait.

Ezri convinces him to go outside the city for once, to take a ritual bath together in an ice cold pool.

The situation is obviously extremely complicated for Aaron, who has a family and a business to take care of. But as an atheist it's easy to start asking myself why Ezri can't just leave the Ultra-Orthodox community in the Old City and go to secular, tolerant Tel Aviv or something. But for one thing, he is very young; he was only just kicked out of his Yeshiva. And most important of all, this is his community and his religion just as much as everyone else's. He believes in God just as much as everyone else.

About 90 percent of the film was shot in Jaffa, and 10 percent in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem, where the story is set, in quick "hit-and-run" shots without official permission, due to the controversial nature of the film. The end result is still very realistic and recognizable as Mea Shearim.

This is a very subtle film that neither glorifies nor demonizes anybody, told in simple and beautiful images in limestone and pale green.

* * *

... And, of course, Ran Danker (actor, pop singer, model) is so hot that I was in exhilarated spasms every second he was on the screen.

Here are some bonus photos of him ...

He was hairier than this in Eyes Wide Open, so either he went through a second puberty in between, or he probably shaves or crops his chest hair. ;_;

Our mum would tell him to wear his pants properly.

The "Kandahar captives"

Recently a big Russian film has been released, which dramatizes the until now rather forgotten story about a Russian cargo plane crew that was held hostage for more than a year by the Taliban in 1995, but managed to escape with their own plane, after convincing their captors that this expensive plane, a great asset for the Taliban, needed regular maintenance.

The film stars some of the most popular Russian actors today, and seems to avoid as much of the back story as possible, instead focusing on individual crew members and their heroic feat. Which is kind of frustrating, because it's very interesting.

Some of the back story can be read in the book Merchant of death by Douglas Farah and Stephen Brown.

The plane was an air freighter owned by the Kazan-based company Aerostan, that had been leased by the company Transavia, owned by a man by the name of Viktor Bout. The secretive Bout, presumably born 1967 near Dushanbe, Tajik SSR, and a former Soviet military translator, was making "a significant amount of money" through his many air transport companies. In the 1990's he became the top private supplier and transporter of arms, with the reputation of one who would deliver no matter the circumstances. His clients have included both UNITA rebels and government forces in Angola, several sides in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnian Muslim forces, both government forces/Northern Alliance and the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as US army and private contractors in Iraq, while also carrying relief supplies for the UN to alleviate the same conflicts. He has always been careful to stay on the technically legal side, albeit frequently violating UN arms embargoes. (However, Bout was arrested in Bangkok 2008 and has been in prison until this day.)

Bout's cargo planes would very often have to land and take off from airstrips so crude that they would have been impossible for modern freighters, and with no maintenance facilities whatsoever. But he used tough old Soviet planes - Antonovs, Ilyushins and Yakovlevs, some of them 40 year old models - for which such conditions were not a problem. The crews were just as tough, and able to do any necessary maintenance and repair by themselves. Mobutu Sese Seko, who in 1997 took off from Zaire into exile on an Antonov owned by Bout, as pursuing rebel forces fired a hail of bullets at the plane's fuselage, later commented: "We were lucky it was a Russian plane. If it had been a Boeing, it would have exploded."

The Ilyushin Il-76 that was forced to land in Kandahar in 1995 was piloted by Vladimir Sharpatov, a decorated former Soviet Air Force pilot, who had been working on and off for Bout for years. This particular flight was just one of many routine runs Sharpatov flew shipping weapons from Tirana, Albania, to the government forces (later Northern Alliance) in Kabul, Afghanistan. At the time, Kandahar was controlled by the Taliban, who patrolled the air space around the city with a single MiG-21. Usually Sharpatov had no problems with the Taliban MiG if he just kept his plane at a safe distance, but this time he was apparently not so lucky.

The plane was forced to land, and the crew of seven was held hostage by the Taliban for over a year. As they had been shipping weapons to the government forces, the Taliban assumed that Russia was providing military support to the Afghan government, and tried to pressure Moscow into releasing prisoners captured during the Soviet Union's war with Afghanistan. Since Bout operated independently, and the Russian government had no interest in getting mixed up in Afghanistan again, this was not true. Negotiations dragged on, and the crew was promised to be released many times, but nothing happened. Meanwhile, apparently Viktor Bout saw the situation as an opportunity, and established business relations with the Taliban while negotiating for the release of his plane and crew. There are suspicions that the Taliban "let" the crew escape after reaching a sweet deal with Bout.

When they returned to Russia, the crew was received as heroes, and certainly their ordeal and their daredevil escape should not be belittled, as they in any case probably did not know what deals were possibly being made about them, and planned and carried out their escape all by themselves.

However, this film is a bit disturbing not only in that it avoids telling most of the back story.

The crew of seven is reduced to five and given different names in the film - in which process the Tatar names of some of the crew members are changed into more Slavonic-sounding names: second pilot Gazinur Hairullin (played by the handsome Vladimir Mashkov) becomes "Seryoga", and flight engineer Askhat Abbyazov (played by bright-eyed Bogdan Benyuk) gets the Ukrainian name Vakulenko. The Aerostan plane, which originally had decals with the Tatarstan flag, gets "RusTransAviaExport" decals with Russian flags. And when religion comes up, the crew members are either practising Christians (Abbyazov/Vakulenko is one of them) or don't care - none of them shows any signs of a Muslim background.

The real story might have been much more about international arms dealing and the political situation in the mid-1990's. But in a St. Petersburg Times interview, director Andrei Kavun said: “My film is about the fact that it is possible to love your country, regardless of its attitude toward you.” Indeed, it focuses (tries to, at least) on the individual crew members and how they react to their imprisonment and the seeming indifference towards them from Russia. The tone is set in the beginning, when Seryoga escapes from the Turkish police (in the film the plane takes off from Istanbul, not Tirana) after engaging in shady dealings on the beach, and his partner shouts: "We Russians don't abandon our people!" Basically the message is about "individual patrotism", solidarity with your countrymen in spite of how much your nation might screw you over.

In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, Kavun explains further:

"My main moral thread was not about Afghanistan, but about contemporary Russia. In the Great Patriotic War, we were all Russians whether we were Jews, Chechens, Tatars, Georgians, Ukrainians, Russians or others. When Nazis captured a Soviet soldier who was a Chechen, they called him a Russian and they killed him as a Russian.
Now we have grown very particular about our ethnic, confessional and other differences to the point that we can no longer exist next to each other. My movie is about five different people who are caught up in a tragic situation which aggravates their differences. Each one thinks that he is right and each one has a right to his truth. But only when they put their differences aside do they manage to survive together and make a heroic escape. It is about coming to terms with each other, making allowances and compromises."

So why did he have to erase the Tatar elements in the story? Is Kavun talking about a "Russianness" where ethnic minorities can easily find their culture "assimilated to death", while the majorities might have problems realising that their culture is actually not the norm for everyone who calls themselves Russian?

Another explanation could be that this film was made in 2010. After all, while the Tatar elements have been removed, there is plenty of anti-Islamism. Most of the Afghans are portrayed as idiots, emotional, aggressive, fanatical, uncultured, and easily diverted with games and bribed with watches and jewelry.

Enough rambling, and on to the screencaps!

Click to enlarge:

Turkish policemen

The crew of the Il-76

Commotion as the plane lands in Kandahar. The film was shot in Morocco, and I seriously doubt they bothered to fly in Afghan people to play any of the Afghan roles. But in any case, there are lots of handsome men in the crowds of stereotypically "angry and violent Orientals" ...

The interpreter - "Misha", as he calls himself. Played by Imomberdy Mingbaev (his name sounds Tajik).

Adil, the Russian-speaking MiG-21 pilot, is played by the Tatar Ramil Sabitov: yet another role in his long career of "swarthy bandits" ... And particularly ironic in this film, where some of the "heroes" in real life were Tatars like him.

Sabitov has a large fanbase of people who appreciate his manliness.

More handsome extras.

Some of the guards.

Vityek tries to get on the guards' good side by gambling with them (!).

Then he speaks to Misha about converting to Islam and joining the Taliban, and the possible benefits he would get from it. When the other crew members find out they kick his ass.

The pilot is forced to teach the Taliban how to fly the Ilyushin.

The youngest of the guards.

Seryoga

Doing "maintenance" on the plane ...

Vityek convinces this cute guy to let him ride his bicycle, so he can maybe ride way out along the air strip and check out the anti-aircraft gun positioned there.

It's Friday, and most of the guys guarding them have gone off to do their prayers. Now is the chance ...

And for comparison, here are some authentic photos, taken by a Russian doctor who was with a team who was allowed to visit the hostages - again, click to enlarge:

The MiG-21 pilot in front of the Aerostan Ilyushin

Crew members eating

One of them is clearly sporting a "Tatarfro" ...

The doctors also treated some locals while they were in Kandahar.

Street scene

There are more authentic photos at EnglishRussia.

.