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Having Sex with the Wind: What Pagan Fertility Rituals Look Like in Russia:
In 'Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari,' filmmaker Aleksey Fedorchenko explores the underground rituals and fertility practices of a pagan tribe in the Russian Urals.
(A girl in traditional Mari costume.)
A woman spreads white and blue cloth on a ground covered with autumn leaves. Then she lays out three round breads, three eggs, some chocolates in rustling shiny wrappers, and props up a candle. "Mother of Birth, help me," she says. "Take away my birthmarks, they make me ugly." This is the opening scene of Aleksey Fedorchenko's film Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari, an exploration of the ancient customs of Mari people and one of the most captivating female narratives in contemporary Russian cinema.
The Mari are a Finno-Ugric ethnic group that live in the eastern part of Western Russia: mainly in the Mari El Republic and around the Ural Mountains in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. They are not an isolated minority by any means—in the 2010 Russian census, over 574,000 people said they identified as Mari—but their stories are often missing from the official narrative of Russia as a white, Slavic, and Orthodox Christian country.
https://broadly.vice.co ... ke-in-russia
Video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT5J120JYIM |
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