The New Yorker:

In 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible,” Arbugaeva recalled. Arbugaeva was working on a photography project about an Indigenous Chukchi community that practices subsistence hunting (whales, walruses, and seals, following the international quotas), and the siblings were on a hunt, at sea, when they landed on the beach. “In the middle of it stood the old hut,” Arbugaeva added. The hunters said that over the past decade, a young scientist had lived in the hut for several months out of each year, among thousands of walruses. “We were intrigued,” Arbugaeva wrote. They returned the following year to meet the scientist, a marine biologist named Maxim Chakilev, and take some photographs. “It was really overwhelming,” Arbugaeva said. “I was completely shocked by what I saw.” [Continue reading…]