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films of gulag

films of the Khanty

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films of gulag

On foot through gulag land – series

On foot through gulag land	Northern Urals	52 min	video
On foot through gulag land	Kolima	54 min	video
On foot through gulag land	Polar Urals	51 min	video
On foot through gulag land	Angara	55 min	video
On foot through gulag land	Kazakhstan	56 min	video
On foot through gulag land	Karelia	50 min	video
On foot through gulag land	Taymir-Norilsk	52 min	video
On foot through gulag land	The Transpolar Railway	52 min	video
On foot through gulag land	The Northernmost Camps	50 min	video

We cannot even hope to understand or interpret the Gulag or the Holocaust without a knowledge of its minute detalis. This is why it is important to learn the one-time Gulag camps and their setting.

It is my experience that totalitarian ideas are constantly resurfacing in a new garb (fundamentalism, neo-Fascism, racism), which George Orwell, for the lack of a better expression, labelled nationalism, distinguishing between its “positive”, “transferred” and “negative” forms. He regarded Communism and anti-Semitism as a negative form of nationalism, and assigned Pacifism to the category of “transferred” nationalism, noting that “there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.” I feel that it is my duty to do everything in my power to shake up people with the means at my disposal. I have been researching and filming in the former Soviet Union (in Russia and in Siberia) for over two decades, and thus I had the opportunity to visit the remains of the hidden Gulag camps maintained by the Soviet dictatorship.

The series shows my experiences during my search for the remains of the one-time Gulag camps. I covered several thousand kilometres by foot, recording on film what life is like today in these regions, as well as surprising encounters, testimonies and reminiscences of the past.

Part 1 Searching for the camps in the Northern Urals, where János Rózsás had been imprisoned, I found a still active prison zone, where the trees are felled by prison inmates even today. A slightly drunk Komi man apologizes for what he did in Budapest in 1956, as a conscript.

Part 2 György Zoltán Bien, who fled to the US in 1956 after Soviet troops overran Budapest, had been a prisoner of the Gulag earlier. Searching for the camps along the River Kolyma, I often lost my way in the vast uninhabited region. I befriend Even reindeer herders at one of the camp ruins. Gold miners tell me about the heaps of human bones marking the one-time location of the Serpantika camp, used for executions in the 1930s.

Part 3 I travel to the Vorkuta coalmines, where Imre Gyula Szekeres was imprisoned, through the Polar Urals. A Khanty family of reindeer herders recounts why their families had been deported to the Gulag, and how escaped convicts had murdered their relatives during the Soviet era.

Part 4 My search for the camps, where Magdolna Rhor and Sándor Adorján were imprisoned and forced to build the railway line, takes me to the River Angara. I meet a former prisoner who had been born in Manchuria, and I interview a former camp commander, who recounts how the Japanese prisoners froze to death. I also manage to speak with a Latvian man and others, who tell me what life was like in the camps.

Part 5 Using István Szak’s memoirs as a guidebook, I search for the most ill-famed death camp in the Karlag in Kazakhstan. I am accompanied by a half-Lithuanian, half-Ukrainian film director living in Kazakhstan, who had been born in the Gulag and wants to revisit his place of birth, the Karaganda camp.

Part 6 Looking for the camps, where the soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy had been imprisoned, I find myself in the place where the Gulag, the vast network of Soviet concentration camps was born. Walking through the woods of Karelia, dotted with graves of the executed prisoners, I eventually reach the still heavily guarded White Sea–Baltic canal, the first major construction project employing coerced labour.

These films are intended as a memorial to the millions of innocent victims of the Gulag, and they offer an insight into the life of the regions, where these camps once stood.

Other screenings:

Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Embassy of the Republic of Hungary, Washington DC

Awards:

Mediawave International Film Festival, 2002

Vagabond – Hungarian Adventure Sport and Nature Film Festival, 2003

Slowfilm Festival – 2007

Ministry of Defence, Hungary  2010  – Honours