Guest
During the autumn of 1989, the director visited the territory of the USSR in search of the places where Polish citizens sent to labor camps had been executed. His route was marked out by diaries of former prisoners and the deportation chronology. First, in 1937, Polish citizens from Eastern Borderlands being against collective farming were resettled to Kazakhstan. In 1939, after the USSR invaded Poland, border soldiers were sent to Siberia. Some time later, several thousand civilians, their relatives, were also sent there. Orphaned daughters of the soldiers talk about the fate of their families. In 1941, thousands more were deported from the country. In 1944, the NKVD disarmed and arrested the Home Army units that wanted to support the Warsaw insurgents. The end of World War II turned out to be the beginning of a new occupation. Between 1947 and 1950, “traitors to the country“ were transported to the uranium mine in Kolyma. There, they had to deal with frost, hunger, and strict surveillance. Józef Gębski, a director and screenwriter, the founder of the Academy of Film and Television in Warsaw (1998). This documentary was created in cooperation with the Union of Siberians in Poland and the Moscow “Memorial“ Society. The title refers to the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, describing the prison system in the USSR. The theme of Polish martyrdom in Soviet labor camps was continued by the director in the following productions: From the Gulag Archipelago to America (film - 1999) and Zbrodnia na Kołymie (reportage - 1993). His documentary Don’t kill (1991) and film Katyń (2007) depict the murder of Polish officers in Katyń. From the Gulag Archipelago received the Filmmakers Association Award at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (1990).
