Hélène Chatelain

This excellent and breathtaking documentary is the result of a long study on the Gulag to try to understand why more than 60 million Soviet citizens were sent to the camps from 1918 to 1956, how such a massive confinement could take place during two generations. From the Solovki in the north-west to the Kolima in Siberia, from Lenine to Kroutchev, a polar geography is erected into the Gulag system. One does not escape from camps. After ten years of imprisonment, one dies. Some survived, some left traces; they witness: organisation, work and discipline, but also resistance, repression and revolt.

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With breathless pace, Hélène Chatelain ("the woman" in "La Jetée") reconstructs the life of Nestor Makhno from his writings, Soviet propaganda films, reactions of workers today and the memory he has left in the hearts & minds of his people in Gouliaïpolié, in the east of the Ukraine.

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The only film to emerge from France’s Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons was this collaboration between filmmaker and writer Hélène Châtelain and her colleague René Lefort which extends the GIP initiative to end the silence around incarceration in France. Blocked from shooting inside prison walls, the filmmakers ask former inmates, guards and bystanders to describe their experience with the institution. Their feature is a crucial part of a broad constellation of projects – a post-68 vérité wave – in which women, immigrants, factory workers, and other marginalized groups began using film and video to analyze their position within global struggles. Incarceration is one factor that ties these struggles together: “None of us is sure to escape prison,” Foucault wrote in the GIP manifesto, “Today less than ever.”

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