★★★☆☆ Having premièred at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, Jessica Oreck's Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys (2013) reaches UK cinemas this week on limited release. It's a meditative study on the lives and rituals of reindeer herders in Lapland - a delicate, deeply evocative 'slice of life' that tranquilly contemplates our relationship with the natural world. A documentary in the simplest sense, Aatsinki's minimalist approach observes a family of reindeer herders in Finnish Lapland for an entire year. The Finnish landscape is sublime, romantically photographed by Oreck with ice-layered vistas and crisp snow giving way to banks of firs trees that proudly stand to attention against the horizon.
- 5/27/2014
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
2014 is now in full swing, the Sundance Film Festival has closed its doors, and film festivals like South by Southwest and Tribeca are generating more buzz for the year’s noteworthy indie narratives and documentaries. In recent years, documentaries such as Restrepo, Gasland, and Searching For Sugarman went on to become heavyweights. This year’s contenders include topics taken from popular memoirs and biographies, along with subject matter pertaining to youths and youth culture. Below, you’ll find a comprehensive list of Sundance and non-Sundance documentaries to keep an eye out for this year, equipped with official synopsis and trailer when available. 2014 is shaping out to a versatile year in the documentary world, ranging from heavy-handed family dramas such as Tracy Droz Tragos’ and Andrew Droz Palermo’s Rich Hill, to baseball biographies such as Chapman and Maclain Way’s The Battered Bastards of Baseball and Jeff Radice’s No No A Dockumentary,...
- 3/9/2014
- by Christopher Clemente
- SoundOnSight
The uncompromising yet lovely vérité doc Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys takes an unadorned, soulful look at a year in the lives of a pair of brothers who are among a collective of reindeer herders in rural Finland. A departure in many ways from the zany Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck’s new film is bloody and ice bound, showcasing a world of rustic north European life rarely glimpsed on screen. The grim slaughter of reindeer and the daily tribulations of running such an operation doesn’t escape the director’s eye; neither does the tenderness and decency of the people doing such work. […]...
- 2/3/2014
- by Brandon Harris
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
The uncompromising yet lovely vérité doc Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys takes an unadorned, soulful look at a year in the lives of a pair of brothers who are among a collective of reindeer herders in rural Finland. A departure in many ways from the zany Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck’s new film is bloody and ice bound, showcasing a world of rustic north European life rarely glimpsed on screen. The grim slaughter of reindeer and the daily tribulations of running such an operation doesn’t escape the director’s eye; neither does the tenderness and decency of the people doing such work. […]...
- 2/3/2014
- by Brandon Harris
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
There are helicopters and snowmobiles and walkie-talkies in use throughout Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, but the tool most often employed in Jessica Oreck's patient, immersive documentary is a more primitive one: the knife.
The Finnish reindeer herders (primarily brothers Aarne and Lasse Aatsinki) whose rugged existence she's chronicled here, are forever stripping branches into smaller pieces of firewood; in one enveloping early sequence, we watch two workers dissect an animal into its exports of meat and fur using a palm-sized blade but also a hacksaw.
As in those firewood shots, Oreck's camera follows the trail of the blade, at least until the time comes to hunch over and extract the reindeer's swollen, slippery stomach.
Her film contains lit...
The Finnish reindeer herders (primarily brothers Aarne and Lasse Aatsinki) whose rugged existence she's chronicled here, are forever stripping branches into smaller pieces of firewood; in one enveloping early sequence, we watch two workers dissect an animal into its exports of meat and fur using a palm-sized blade but also a hacksaw.
As in those firewood shots, Oreck's camera follows the trail of the blade, at least until the time comes to hunch over and extract the reindeer's swollen, slippery stomach.
Her film contains lit...
- 1/22/2014
- Village Voice
For us in North America, Winter formally arrives this Saturday, December 21. But the season has already changed — online, at least, and to Fall — for the arctic cowboys of Aatsinki Season, the hypnotic online collaboration between director Jessica Oreck and transmedia developers Murmur. For the last nine months, an online extension of Oreck’s documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, has been streaming and scrolling online, with each quarter bringing a new set of meditative observations. When the project premiered, Oreck discussed the difference between the film and the site: The film is very pure, direct cinema—an immersive […]...
- 12/19/2013
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
For us in North America, Winter formally arrives this Saturday, December 21. But the season has already changed — online, at least, and to Fall — for the arctic cowboys of Aatsinki Season, the hypnotic online collaboration between director Jessica Oreck and transmedia developers Murmur. For the last nine months, an online extension of Oreck’s documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, has been streaming and scrolling online, with each quarter bringing a new set of meditative observations. When the project premiered, Oreck discussed the difference between the film and the site: The film is very pure, direct cinema—an immersive […]...
- 12/19/2013
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
When we last checked in with 25 New Face filmmaker Jessica Oreck, she was attending the Pov Hackathon, a two-day event at which the documentary television series paired filmmakers with web developers. There Oreck met Mike Knowlton and Hal Siegel of the hybrid studio/technology company Murmur, and in just over three months the team has created The Aatsinki Season, an online counterpart to Oreck’s forthcoming feature documentary, Aatsinki: The Story Of Arctic Cowboys. Launching today, the work is both hypnotic and thoughtful, comprising text, film and flow charts, and allowing the viewer to initiate debate over the ecological issues facing …...
- 12/11/2012
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
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