Film 01: A piece of history untouched by film

Film tends to span across the future and past especially across recent years and if it touches on the past it never goes that far back. Period films which do go that extra time backwards only really covers popular events that a viewer most of the time had already heard of or been educated on in schools such as the films Dunkirk or Chernobyl.

Now I know European/American films don't speak for the rest of the globe but for the period I am about to discuss I believe it should be more relevant especially due to the recent Ukrainian war that is devastating the population and causing tragedy across the area. The Stalin era is the one that I want to focus on but not just Stalin as the historic figure himself as films like The Death Of Stalin cover his life in a comedic POV. It is the network of Gulags across the whole of Russia that with a little digging was insane. There was 30,000 camps in the Soviet Union at its height, reigning terror over its own people.

About a year ago from this post I wrote a short story about a Gulag and based some of the events and characters of true events/people and this story primarily revolved around the Gulag camp called Vorkutlag. In order to create that story I did some fair research into the period and the function of the camp. Some bits of information that I uncovered really did sicken me and made me wonder two things: The first being why I hadn't really been taught of this in school and secondly was why I hadn't seen a show/film or really even heard a book about the Gulags.

As writing the story I felt I had to truly grasp the horrors that these camps caused and I wanted to personify the pain correctly similar to Steven Spielberg in Schindlers list. Which had originally neglected making the film as he thought he could not visually describe how bad the Holocaust was by a 2-3 hour film.