The Van­quish­ing of the Witch Baba Yaga

This odd and intrigu­ing lit­tle film explores the quaint folk­loric qual­i­ties still present in mod­ern day east­ern Europe. It drifts between a ghoul­ish Hansel and Gre­tel-like fairy tale, pre­sent­ed in illus­trat­ed sto­ry­book tableaux and with a the­atri­cal­ly-intoned voiceover, and ran­dom snip­pets of con­tem­po­rary work­ing class life. It’s an essay film in the mode of the late, great Chris Mark­er, as inter­est­ed in the every­day poet­i­cism of a street scene or peo­ple just going about their busi­ness as it is in mak­ing sub­tle philo­soph­i­cal con­nec­tions between a range of dis­parate top­ics and ideas.

Direc­tor Jes­si­ca Oreck nev­er push­es too hard to make the com­par­isons between fan­ci­ful fic­tion and hard­scrab­ble real­i­ty too obvi­ous, allow­ing plen­ty of room to manœu­vre when it comes to inter­pre­ta­tion. The fairy tale itself charts how two chil­dren are forced into a for­bid­ding wood­land when hid­ing from rov­ing sol­diers. They come across the hut of the evil witch Baba Yaga who sets them a series of tri­als. If they fail, the witch threat­ens to eat them. The doc­u­men­tary sequences show tum­ble­down cities with archi­tec­ture that com­bines the mod­ern and the classical.

It also cap­tures a com­mu­ni­ty of for­agers as they take to the coun­try­side with their pock­etknives and woven bas­kets to col­lect up the toad­stool-shaped boun­ty that’s avail­able to them. Just as sto­ries fil­ter down through gen­er­a­tions, their search is also shown as a process of edu­ca­tion. Kids learn how to col­lect mush­rooms, lest their future well­be­ing leads them to such endeav­ours. The film plays a sin­gle note, but it’s sat­is­fy­ing­ly off-key and is deliv­ered in a range of vol­umes and textures.