Kolyma (2017)

mini | Gulag prisoners in a gold mine on the Kolyma (1934) Filmmaker Mucha embarks on a partly fictional journey through the Kolyma region of Siberia, one of the former centers of the Gulag, the Soviet penal camp system. He follows his grandfather’s trail along the R504 highway. His grandfather was arrested as a spy, convicted under Article 58.6, and sent to the Gulag. Nearly seventy years earlier, in 1952, he arrived in Magadan, before being sent on to Yakutsk via the road known by its victims as the “Road of Bones.” Between Magadan and Yakutsk, more than 2,000 kilometers apart, runs the road built in the 1930s to the 1950s by Gulag forced laborers, who also had to work in gold, silver, uranium, and other mines around the road under inhuman conditions (“victims of Stalinist and post-Stalinist state paranoia”). Many lost their lives; human skulls and bones can be found along the road, in some places just 15 centimeters beneath the surface. “It is probably the longest cemetery in the world,” with an estimated more than three million dead. Stanisław Mucha also gives a vivid portrait of life today along the road in the Kolyma region and documents his sometimes surreal experiences. In Magadan, the starting point of the “Road of Bones,” he meets a street vendor for whom the word “Gulag” has no meaning at all. In this way, Mucha indirectly, and sometimes bizarrely, criticizes the weak Russian culture of remembrance for the victims claimed by the Stalinist camp system.