Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal (2023) Short Film Review
Mysterious, heartbreaking, beautiful and terrifying.
Alisi Telengut’s new animated short Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Telengut’s narrative is basically replaced by a dire, yet calm message about growth, evolution and how we observe life and the place that gives it. This very interpretative piece is not a traditional short feature that everyone will be able to appreciate in its full form, but it’s only because sometimes we don’t give ourselves to opportunity to see beyond the rules of entertainment, and most important of all, to listen to the past. A past that has a lot to say to us.
In Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal, we witness the formation of a natural body of water. This isn’t made through high-speed photography, fancy animation or archival footage. Telengut is a master at the craft of hand-crafted and experimental pieces that aren’t like anything else in the industry. Using stop-motion animation, she draws nature in a raw and almost intimate manner that takes viewers on a different storytelling journey. It accomplishes its goal, but it isn’t an easy one. Without its very effective sonic backdrop, Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal is simple. But there’s nothing simple in what Telengut is trying to tell the world. Actually, scratch that. Let’s make that “announce.”
Using an ancient language spoken by an indigenous woman, Telengut addresses the mysterious aspect of evolution, one perfectly tuned to the endangered Mongolian dialect of Buryat. The narrative is precise but shapeless, a series of words and phrases that only make sense if you observe beyond traditional stories told by ancestors. They didn’t need elaborate words. Sometimes they just looked up to the sky and then to the ground, and announced their legendary take on where we come from, and where we’re probably heading.
A collection of sound effects combined with the texture of limestone and white marble, all painted and redesigned by a filmmaker whose views are fundamental to the message of time and its ability to destroy and heal. Telegut doesn’t ever confirm what she’s trying to say by the use of rules and scripts. She just expresses herself through a lost art and a lost language to make the viewer understand the importance of legacy and traditions, as they vanish due to time and our relationship with nature. Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal is exciting as an artistic piece, but the most important thing is that it forces you to think of yourself and where you’re standing at this precise moment in time.
