Director's Commentary
In the beginning was the swing
»On our bony Kolyma road trip, I personally (in a spiritual, not cinematic sense) followed in the footsteps of my grandfather, who travelled this route shortly before Stalin's death in 1953.
One day at the end of 1952 he was arrested as an alleged spy, just because one of his daughters had a strong affinity for matches and as a child set fire to three villages. The grandfather was taken away and put into a wagon of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After more than a month he arrived in Vladivostok and was loaded onto a ship. Finally he got off at the frozen Pacific Ocean in the Bay of Magadan and was chased through the whole Kolyma Strait to its end point. On the way he actually didn't experience anything bad and only had to build a wooden swing for the child of a camp commander, who lived there in the house above a camp together with his family. Just as he was finishing it, Stalin died.
On Kolyma, as in the whole Russian empire, absolute chaos broke out and general insecurity spread among the population. In the course of this chaos my grandfather managed to escape from Kolyma and one wintery day he returned home from Siberia in sneakers. When I saw a swing photo three years ago in an exhibition about Warlam Shalamov (22 years imprisonment on Kolyma) in Berlin, my memory of the swing story began to take shape and I decided to make a film about Kolyma. My grandfather often spoke of a Russian writer who was still unknown at the time, a certain Shalamov, whom he met on his short and rather absurd Kolyma odyssey. An absurd one, because after all he had to travel such a long way just to make a single, banal children's swing on Kolyma. This is why this author ironically titled my grandfather: 'Artist of the Swing'.
Now the irony of absurd travel continued in "Kolyma": where my grandfather exhibited his swing, I made a film. I also remembered a rather ambiguous Kolyma saying from my grandfather, which he also heard from Shalamov and always unpacked whenever things got unnecessarily complicated in life. He said:
"There are no impossible things in the world for God. On Kolyma, they happened every day."
Come with me on this journey and you will not regret it. On that note...«
Stanislaw Mucha