Holgut

Where melting permafrost turns science into myth

In the vast and fragile wilderness of Yakutia, the northernmost desert on Earth, the frozen ground is melting and releasing traces of a distant past. Mammoth bones rise from the permafrost, wild animals vanish, and the boundaries between reality, memory, and imagination begin to dissolve. Against this backdrop, Holgut follows three Yakutians on separate yet interconnected journeys through a land in transition.

Roman, a village hunter, and his younger brother Kyym, raised partly in the city, search for a rare wild reindeer that has all but disappeared, transforming the animal into a near mythical presence. Not far away, scientist Semyon meticulously explores the thawing permafrost, driven by the obsessive hope of finding a viable mammoth cell that could one day enable the cloning of an extinct species. Their paths unfold amid an ongoing mass extinction of fauna and flora and a modern Siberian ivory rush, as climate change reshapes both the land and human ambition.

Rather than constructing a scientific essay, the film moves fluidly between observation, fiction, and visual poetry. As the frozen earth softens, so too does the certainty of what is real. Holgut becomes a contemporary myth where science fiction edges toward reality, and reality itself slips into legend, offering a cinematic meditation on extinction, de extinction, and humanity’s fragile place within a changing world.