Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Billed as 'Werner Herzog presents...', Happy People is the German director's 90 minute cut, with his own commentary and new music, of a four hour Russian documentary following a handful of Siberian trappers through the course of a year. This is boy's own stuff – we watch these gruff, bearded men as they spend the spring and summer preparing for the winter trapping season, building huts and traps, laying down supplies, making skis with just a small hand axe, and talking about their dogs with deep and heartfelt emotion. Their wives and children, by contrast, barely register.

The film is old fashioned in tone and the use of actorly voices to dub the trappers is initially grating. Nor does it have those crazed moments of 'ecstatic truth' that we expect from Herzog. But this is a slow-burning experience, as the incredible self-reliance of these men, along with the immense solitude of their lives, begins to take on almost cosmic overtones. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]