Gulag

A voyage in time and space which gives voices and faces to the anonymous victims fo the Soviet system of concentration camps, to the innumerable forgotten of the 'Gulag Archipelago'. Iossif Pasternak and Hélène Châtelain rewind the tragic thread of history, returning to the places of detention and disappearance. They try to understand the monstrous logic of this imperative event of the 20th century: the deportation of millions of individuals who were judged politically dangerous. During this journey across the immense stretches of Russian land with its extremes of light and climate, former deportees, survivors who have seen their families die of starvation, children of detainees or of officials, witnesses from the villages, descendants of the 'dekoulakization' (corollary to the ruthless collectivisation of the land) or historians, all are invited to speak on the policy of deporting 'enemies of the government' its historical continuity and in its geographical, political, economic and religious contexts. By examining the specificities of the Soviet model of detention, the filmmakers do not simply show us film archives. They film the present life of these regions' inhabitants, many of whom are descendents fo yesterday's forced labour prisoners. They film the existence of today's prisoners in images which are superimposed like a shadow on the old conditions of detention, thereby making palpable the tragedy of an entire peope, an entire country.