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This year’s international competition program of ZagrebDox international documentary film festival featured,  among a large number of documentary films of various profiles, the film “Wind has no tail” (for the festival, the title was translated as “Odlazak”) by two young Russian documentary filmmakers, Ivan Vlasov and Nikita Stashkevich. 

The film tells the story of a girl named Nika from a Nenets family, who will soon go to school, like her older sisters. However, the peculiarity of her story is that she will go to school for a whole year by helicopter, because Nika and her family and their herd of reindeer roam the tundra of the Yamal Peninsula (Arctic lowland region in northwestern Siberia, west-central Russia). As noted above, Nika comes from a family of Nenets, an ethnic group that is classified as one of the indigenous minority peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East of Russia. 

Daily routine of this girl consists of elements that will seem surprising to most people - traveling on reindeer, performing protective rituals by burning special herbs, processing reindeer together with her parents, after which her mother says that some parts of the animal must be given to a shaman (a special person in religious practices for interacting with spirits). Nika and her family communicate with each other in their native Nenets language, the mother tells her daughters local fairy tales, and the father scares the children with an evil witch so that they do not go far from home. 

Nika and her sisters' ordinary life is interrupted by lessons with a nomadic teacher who prepares the girls for school. In particular, they learn Russian, for example, by practicing writing letters on the wet sand by the river. There is an interesting scene in the film where the teacher asks Nika to build a house from counting sticks. Instead of the usual image of a house consisting of a triangular roof and a square façade, she lays out only the triangular part, because for her, a house looks exactly like this - a chum, a traditional Nenets dwelling, is a cone-shaped tent made of reindeer hides sewn together or bark stretched over a wooden frame. 

The only chance for these children to get a basic school education is to fly by helicopter to the nearest town and live in a boarding school for the entire school year. According to the legislation of the Russian Federation, secondary school education is mandatory for all citizens, so for these girls, attending school is also an obligation.

A telling moment in the film is the scene of the girls getting ready for their first school year, where you can see how unusual and uncomfortable it is for them to be dressed in white ironed shirts and new shoes. Things that are familiar to most children feel alien and strange to these girls, but at the same time, their “ordinary” life is actually a unique and unusual example.

It is impossible not to mention the wonderful cinematography in the film. Cameraman Elizaveta Popova captured both impressive extensive panoramic views of the tundra, as well as chamber scenes like an evening family tea party in a small plague or shots of Nika sitting on a bed at boarding school, showing her aloofness in this place.

To sum up, «Wind Has No Tail» presents a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between tradition and modernity through the life of Nika, a young Nenets girl. The film beautifully captures the contrast between Nika’s daily life in the Arctic tundra, rich with indigenous customs, and the challenges she faces as she navigates her education in a world that is vastly different from her own. Through stunning visuals and intimate moments, the film invites viewers to reflect on the complexities of cultural preservation and the inevitable impact of modern life. Nika’s journey, filled with both wonder and discomfort, serves as a powerful reminder of the resilience of indigenous communities and their unique ways of navigating the changing landscapes of education and tradition.