A film by Stanislaw Mucha. In rus­si­an and ger­man with ger­man subtitles.

“Goulash?,” the young woman loo­king out of the hatch of a com­bi­ned hot dog and piz­za stand on the side of the win­dy Kolyma rou­te asks again. No, Stanislaw Mucha did ask for “Gulag”. And he is asto­nis­hed to find that here, whe­re the Soviet penal and labour camp sys­tem shaped the natu­ral and living envi­ron­ment for deca­des, the term isn’t com­mon­ly used. Actually, for all intents and pur­po­ses, the filmmaker’s jour­ney seems to be more of a trip through word­scapes. It beg­ins in Magadan Bay, which ear­ned its nick­na­me “gate to hell” as the port of ent­ry for the forced labou­rers. It con­ti­nues along the “lon­gest gra­vey­ard in the world”, as the long distance road from the Sea of Okhotsk to Yakutsk is occa­sio­nal­ly cal­led. But it also cros­ses the paths of the living, tho­se who stay­ed here or were born here, who more often than not have bet­ter things to do than to revol­ve around that geni­us loci. Encounters as inspi­ring elec­tric dischar­ges on the hori­zon of expec­ta­ti­ons – like tho­se elec­tric pul­ses an ama­teur phy­si­ci­an picked up along the way wants to use to reju­ve­na­te his old father.

When the pre­sent over­wri­tes the past, when the Putin era super­im­po­ses the Soviet era, when the eter­nal peri­phery is allo­wed to actively par­ti­ci­pa­te in the snapshots made of it, the result are bone dry punch lines: for exam­p­le that slow moti­on pop music video Mucha tre­ats a girls’ dancing trou­pe to as he dri­ves by.

Sylvia Görke | DOK Leipzig

Credits:
Deutschland 2017, 85 Min., rus­sisch, deut­sche OmU
Buch, Regie: Stanislaw Mucha
Kamera: Enno Endlicher
Schnitt: Stanislaw Mucha, Emil Rosenberger 

Termine:

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