Seven Songs from the Tundra () is a 1999 Finnish film directed by Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio that is the first narrative film in the Nenets language. It tells stories of the indigenous nomadic people of the Russian tundra under modern Communist rule, combining Nenets legends with personal experiences. The film won the Grand Prix of the Créteil International Women's Film Festival in 2000. It was Finland's submission to the 73rd Academy Awards for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not accepted as a nominee.
Plot
The film is divided into seven short stories.
Sacrifice
A group of Nenets people gather by a tree in the middle of the tundra, decorated in reindeer antlers and a small bell, to butcher a reindeer. A woman anoints the tree with its blood, and places the reindeer head at the base of the tree. They all sit together, drinking reindeer blood from ceramic cups, and eating reindeer meat.
The Bride
A Nenets girl enjoys flirting with the young men who work in her village. When she is told she has been engaged to a man from another village, she begrudgingly goes with him. On the way to his home, she dismounts the sleigh and runs back home. Her mother condemns the girl for going against her wishes, and tells her she can be the servants for the men she loves so much. In a montage, she mends their clothing, cleans a hide, washes their dishes, and works so hard she begins to cry. The young men begin to treat her poorly as their servant; she berates them one morning as she prepares their boots for them, saying, "You swore eternal love to me when my brothers were alive." One of them responds, "I must've been drunk if something like that slipped out of my mouth." Later that morning, she goes with them to the village. There, they introduce her to a Russian man, whom they have just sold her to. Years later, she walks in front of the house of the man she would have married. She laments her loss of beauty and innocence.
An Independent Person
A Nenets man is chopping wood when he sees four Soviet soldiers and a Nenets translator approaching. The translator announces that kolkhoz (collective farming) has arrived in the tundra, and the soldiers are there to collect the man's reindeer. The man says, "If this Kolkoze is poor, then of course we help him. It's the way things are here on the tundra." The translator, however, has other plans. He paints the man as being shrewd and evasive, even insulting, and pits the man and the soldiers against each other until in the end, a soldier draws a gun on the man.
God
Two Nenets men, one a war veteran, stop to have a drink and small meal in front of a statue of Lenin in town. The veteran man recounts his war days, explaining that before the Battle of Vesyoli Village, he poured some vodka on the ground and prayed to Lenin that the bullets wouldn't hit him. Instead, he says, crying, all the locals he knew there died, and he himself was wounded. Gesturing to Lenin's statue bitterly, he says, "I protected Lenin's city, Leningrad." He moves to pour the remainder of his vodka at the base of the statue, but is stopped by a white man in a suit. The men offer him a place to sit with them in front of the statue, but the man declines. Instead, he calls a colleague from his office to remove the men from in front of the statue. "I just walked past Lenin's statue. There were two old Nenets eating there, and drinking vodka. You understand, it's not done." The Nenets men explain to the approaching Russian soldiers that they were simply praying for good weather and good catch before going off fishing. The soldiers deride the men for thinking Lenin is a god.