Montage

Project title: Fósiles del Mar Blanco
English Title: White Sea Fossils
Director: Lina Gorbaneva
Production: Santiago Fillol
Screenplay: Lina Gorbaneva
Production company: Palmeras Salvajes
Duration (estimated): 75′
Genre: Documentary essay
Budget: €134,500

CURRENT STATUS OF THE PROJECT:

Montage

SYNOPSIS:

Among all the horrors we know about the Gulag, one of the most Dantesque was the construction of the White Sea Canal, where thousands of prisoners were forced to dig a pharaonic canal in the frozen Karelian land, connecting the White Sea with the Baltic. For the Soviet authorities, these works were part of the human re-shoeing process to convert the old social types into Bolsheviks. For them, the Gulag was a “museum”, where one could see for the last time the endangered specimens: the aristocrat, the landowner, the bourgeois and the criminal.

NOTE OF INTENTION:

White Sea Fossils is a cinematographic essay that asks about the utopian ideas that forged the construction of the first Gulag, where horror and utopia, creation of a new man and extermination of the human types of the past, were inseparable from each other. The title alludes to the chapter “Monsters and Fossils” from Foucault’s The Order of Things. Stalinist culture “museumized” the pre-revolutionary world, turning the class enemy into a subspecies; a necessary “error”; in a trace of his own annihilation. The essay, constructed from archival material from Soviet films from the 1920s and 1930s, closely follows Foucauldian archaeological method, tracing the gestures that forged the narrative of the new man and tracing its collective roots, spread across multiple layers of documentary and fiction works.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE DIRECTOR:

I am the daughter of Soviet diplomats exiled in Barcelona in 1990. I am trained in Fine Arts and I am finishing my thesis on the narrative of the ‘social vestige’ in the Soviet Union, at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), where I also teach Slavic Aesthetics. Parallel to my academic research career, I have developed as a visual artist, playwright and actress.

Contact: Santiago Fillol

Email: santiago.fillol@gmail.com

Telephone: +34 607 58 01 70