Cedar Milk

60 mins
Self-shooting co-director and editor
Produced by Dorothy Feaver

Cedar Milk looks at the female experience within an eco-religious sect spreading from Siberia throughout the world.

Forest fires lick through Siberia; a veil of black carbon drifts north. A young woman steps out of a log cabin and places a seed under her tongue. Cedar Milk explores ideas of womanhood through the lens of the Ringing Cedars of Russia – a contemporary back-to-the-land movement celebrating a female god created by a man. This is a story about how desires are milked and packaged, tracing a sense of discovery within a closed environment. The film’s title draws on a nutritious but mysterious substance: the milk of the cedar nut is said to have transformative powers.

‘I took three sips … This tender, inexplicable warmth ran through my whole insides.’ (Ringing Cedars, Book 4)

Retreating from the urban world, the Ringing Cedars followers seek a sense of belonging in rural self-sufficiency. They are inspired by a series of books that emerged in the chaos of post-soviet Russia. The author, Vladimir Megre, hawked the first copies on the Moscow subway in 1997, and claims to have sold 20 million copies, along with homespun cedar nut products. He describes meeting a beautiful young prophet, Anastasia, barefoot in the wild forests of Siberia. Through the mouthpiece of this perfect woman, he dictates the solution to social breakdown: families should live on a hectare of land, a fertile ‘kin’s domain’, and women should return to their place in the home. The encounter between author and Anastasia is consummated by sex, and sexual compliance is a touchstone in the Ringing Cedars philosophy of biodynamic spirituality and nationalism.

Economic instability in recent years has been tinder to the project: it promises a slower, simpler existence, away from scrutiny, where gendered roles are a fact of life. Cedar Milk gives voice to women dealing with the daily realities of this dream.