BAMPFA

Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters

Expired September 1, 2021 7:00 AM
Already unlocked? for access
Protected ContentThis content can only be viewed in authorized regions: North America.

Rental fee (includes all parts of the four-part film): $22

Discounted fee for BAMPFA members: $18

Members: to receive your discount, you must log in to Eventive with the same email address you use to receive BAMPFA member communications.


This rental package includes the complete four-part film; each part is also available separately.

In the final chapter of Chamisso’s Shadow, Ottinger travels south along the Chukotka coast to the Kamchatka peninsula, stopping at Bering Island, where Vitus Bering’s ship ran aground and the captain perished “from hunger, thirst, cold, hardship, and grief,” in the words of ship’s naturalist and physician Georg Wilhelm Steller. Ottinger follows Steller’s route back to the mainland, where a spectacular landscape of steaming snow-capped volcanoes, otherworldly ash fields, and lush birch forests was witness to the Cossacks’ conquest and enslavement of the indigenous population. In contemporary towns where fish is industrially processed for sale in supermarkets, developers build high-rises and hatch Bering-themed tourism schemes, and corrupt officials hold local fishermen in a gangsterish grip, Ottinger shows us a land long held in tension between continuity and displacement, beauty and exploitation.


—Juliet Clark

  • Year
    2016
  • Runtime
    177 minutes
  • Language
    German, Russian
  • Country
    Germany
  • Director
    Ulrike Ottinger
  • Screenwriter
    Ulrike Ottinger
  • Cinematographer
    Ulrike Ottinger, Stefan Gohlke