Following in the time-honored tradition of local collaboration in ethnographic filmmaking-Flaherty and Rouch come to mind-this compendium of narrative shorts features native actors portraying vignettes from their local history. Living in the "white Tundra" of northern Russia, the Nenet people once followed survival skills of the arctic that included herding large numbers of reindeer. The film's eerie soundtrack-sometimes silent, sometimes thick with sounds-allows the elegant black-and-white images to play out at their best in a panorama of windswept snowscapes. Some of the themes are decidedly political, questioning the role of Russian interference in local affairs, and replete with newsreel shots of Lenin giving a speech as the soundtrack remains silent. One vignette portrays with gripping realism the wrenching of children from their homes to attend government schools. Soviet Russia shared with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the U.S. this unhappy legacy of colonial power.-Thor Anderson