Karlag

Karlag explores the elision between memory and history, and the traumatic impact processes of cultural and historical amnesia have on individual identity and experience, for populations whose lives remain suspended and without agency within dominant power structures that are focused on promoting new utopian futures. Filmed in the Karlag, a former GULAG in Northeast Kazakhstan, (a major Soviet prison camp of over 600 sq km) the film is set in this vast desert Steppe, with its open cast mines, pylons and former prison camps. Karlag draws on the conflicting experiences of former prisoners and guards of the prison camp, Dolinka, where, following the effective closure of the Gulag system, they still live side by side, as they have nowhere else to go.

Decaying remnants of this formidable system of forced-labour appear in the film, where amongst the fragile remains, the extraordinary scale of hardship, loss and human endurance is now almost invisible. The film moves continually through this landscape, where past trauma is bourne out and voiced through memory and visions: a sickness descending on people following the launch of a Soyuz TMA-9 space rocket from the Russian space station at Baikanur, 500 miles away; a tree lined city avenue, appearing like a mirage and leading nowhere, built through enforced hard labour by intellectuals in the middle of the Steppe; the now derelict central administration building, its windows sealed, its interior in darkness.