MARKKU LEHMUSKALLIO, ANASTASIA LAPSUI, SAKARI TOIVIAINEN

Publication of Sakari Toiviainen's book in Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 4 Feb 2009. With presentations by Sakari Toiviainen and Markku Lehmuskallio.
We celebrate the 70th anniversary of Markku Lehmuskallio with a complete retrospective of the feature films of Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui and their carte blanche series. Today, Sakari Toiviainen's book Kadonnutta paratiisia etsimässä (In Search of Paradise Lost) was published, with exquisite illustrations edited by Kai Vase in collaboration with Markku Lehmuskallio.
Markku Lehmuskallio is a great artist of both documentary and fiction films. Their common subject is the life of the Northern peoples in Lapland, Siberia, and Canada. What Robert Flaherty started in Nanook of the North, Lehmuskallio has done during his whole film career, rescuing the vanishing, primordial cultures of the Sami, the Nenets, the Nganasan, the Selkup, the Inuit, and so on, for instance in his great I Am, the history of the art of the people in the tundra.
He is the documentarian of immemorial tradition and man on the last threshold of survival.
He is also a poet of the forest and of nature. He is an ecological visionary.
Since 1992, Lehmuskallio has made his films with Anastasia Lapsui, a Nenets who belongs to a family of shamans.