Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It's the international cut of Dmitry Vasyukov's sprawling Russian project, re-edited and narrated by Werner Herzog, the filmmaker behind Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

For one full year the camera settles in Bakhta, a tiny village on the Yenisei River deep in the Siberian taiga, and follows the trappers who live there. Winter, spring, summer, fall — four chapters in which men set sable traps, carve dugout canoes from a single trunk, raise their dogs and vanish alone into the forest for weeks. No phones, no bosses, no money in any ordinary sense — just the woods, the river, and skills handed down almost unchanged for centuries.

Herzog's voice drifts over it all, musing on the freedom of a man who answers only to his own hands and to nature. He never sentimentalizes it: the taiga feeds and it kills, and that's simply how it is. A calm, absorbing watch for anyone drawn to honest documentaries about real life far from civilization. Stream Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) online on iFILM.