Kolyma – Road of Bones

One World Festival

There is a road running though Siberia’s Kolyma Region that is built on the blood, sweat, and bones of Soviet gulag prisoners. Along this route, Polish director Stanislaw Mucha meets a diverse range of both comic and serious figures, who he used to build a mosaic of today’s life in this remote and frigid Russian region.

Life must go on, even when hundreds of thousands of people killed by Stalin’s regime lie underfoot and the local inhabitants often run into mass graves. The present overwrites the past, and life overwrites death. The last surviving witnesses to the horrors of Kolyma live side by side with the next generation, some of whom don’t even know the word gulag. The journey along this road of bones – the longest burial ground in the world – opens up a fascinating view of distinct and eccentric personalities, each of whom copes with the harsh local genius loci in their own way.