Otava Yo – Oy, Dusya, oy, Marusya (Cossack lezginka)
2017 · Directed by Alexey Belkin & Vsevolod Aljokhin
274K Likes
Best comments
1.“My son is 22 months old and he's your fan. He constantly asks us to play 'Masyusya'... honestly, our eyes are twitching – but it beats the kids' cartoons.”Translated from Russian
More comments
- 2.“We should all come together and sing in peace. Love from your cold neighbor, Greenland.”
- 3.“The little bridge where the three girls sing, and the chapel in the background? My husband built them – it's a movie set on an island in Lake Ladoga.”Translated from Russian
The story
Otava Yo started out as street buskers in St. Petersburg and grew into one of Russia's busiest folk bands – bagpipes, gusli, fiddles and a bass drum, playing old village songs like they just piled off a rowdy bus. This is their seventh official video. Band leader Alexey Belkin directed it with Vsevolod Aljokhin, and they shot it in July and August of 2016. The title calls it a Cossack lezginka, and the tune borrows a Georgian folk melody called Rachuli, which the band says the group Bani introduced them to.
The song is a teasing village love song. The video is something sadder and stranger. The band's international label, ARC Music, describes it as a search for folklore in villages that are emptying out as people leave for the cities. An old man fixes up a WWII-era Ural motorbike and drifts back through his memories. A modern girl wanders a ruined country mansion, finds a tall mirror and sees herself a century earlier – pregnant, in old clothes. There's a crumbling wooden church, and a door that swings open onto the sea instead of a room. At the end the old man spins a scratchy record alone in his workshop.
It won Best Music Video at the NYC Indie Film Awards, picked up prizes at the Maykop International Film Festival, the Russian World Music Awards and London's BELIFF in 2018, and had passed seven million views by 2019. A still from it became the cover of their album Do You Love, staged to recreate a 1904 color photo by Prokudin-Gorskiy. A flirty party song wrapped around a goodbye to the villages that gave us the songs in the first place.
