Jessica Kiang The term “forced assimilation” has a violence encoded into it that brutalizes the bleak heart of Vladimir Munkuev’s “Nuuccha,” a meticulously re-created if unevenly dramatized portrait of the hardships and humiliations suffered by the indigenous peoples of Eastern Siberia’s Yakutia region in the waning years of the Russian Empire.
Based on a short story by Wacław Sieroszewski, the film is most effective when its narrow focus on a single, desperately poor Yakut couple allows it space to be fascinated by the straightforward ethnographic details of this little-seen time and place.
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