International Competition

The town of Apatity lies within the Arctic Circle. Founded in 1930, it served as a place of exile for Stalin’s political opponents. The climate is grim and unrelenting, and life here is tedious and mind-numbing. Nonetheless, many inhabitants of this gulag continued to live here after the dictator’s death in 1953, and even after the breakup of the Soviet Union. With an eye for visual composition, Ksenia Okhapkina’s film constructs a discourse on state propaganda through the subtle observations of innocuous, everyday situations, for example scenes of young girls learning about discipline at a ballet school or young boys training for the army shown in juxtaposition with snowy landscapes and the rigorous coordination of operations at the local factory. By being omnipresent and at the same time inconspicuous in people’s lives, from an early age, ideology becomes dangerous. Forgoing narration Okhapkina manages to construct a potent observation of the precariousness of free will in the face of state propaganda.