Vorkuta is a video recording of the first in history car journey from Central Europe to the titular Vorkuta, a town in the northern part of the Asian continent, which originated from a group of labor camps, a symbol of the Soviet history of the Gulag, a place shrouded in dark legends. The town is located in a tundra that is difficult to access,
no roads lead to it, while the only contact with the outside world is provided by
a railway line built from scratch by prisoners sent to the camps. To this day, it is not clear how many victims this place consumed. The participants of the expedition, which started from Toruń in the spring of 2011, decided to honor their memory by making their way to Vorkuta along the tracks, the so-called “zimniki” (“winter roads”), that is, frozen, periodically active routes, in order to hand over to the city authorities a plaque commemorating the labor camps. One of the members of the expedition, the grandson of a former convict, for whom the expedition was a kind of settlement with his family past, took with him a small, hand-written prayer book, the most valuable memento
of his grandfather, who spent over a decade in Vorkuta. Years later, this priceless family treasure was to be shipped back beyond the Arctic Circle.
Information on the film
Vorkuta
Poland 2011, 43′
Directed by: Jacek Kiełpiński, Radosław Rzeszotek, Paweł Żydowicz
Cinematography: Paweł Dyllus
Editing: Paweł Żydowicz
Producer: Marek Żydowicz
Important people
