AllMovie

A young woman is torn from her family and her culture in the name of progress in this drama based on a true story, set in the 1980s. Neko (Aleksandra Okotetto) is one of the Nenet people, a tribe of indigenous people native to Northwest Siberia's Yamal Peninsula. Neko lives with her grandmother (Anastasia Lapsui) in a teepee, and their day to day existence is similar to what their people experienced centuries before. But theirs is one of the few Nenet families left, and Soviet social workers determine that Neko would be better off living somewhere else. Neko is taken from her grandmother and sent to a state-run boarding school where she's forced to embrace 20th Century culture and abandon the Nenet language in favor of Russian. Neko is an outcast in her new surroundings, and she feels more isolated than she did as part of the vanishing Nenet culture. Pudana: Last of the Line was written and directed by Anastasia Lapsui (who also plays Neko's grandmother) and Markku Lehmuskallio.