Saveliy Savenko

"Solovky Power" is a documentary about the first Soviet labor camp created by Lenin in 1923. Solovky was established in a complex of ancient monasteries on a cluster of islands off the remote White Sea coast. Though its name derives from the Russian word for nightingale, the title of the film echoes the term 'Soviet power', stressing the fact that from the very beginning the Soviet penal colonies were a world unto themselves.

Depicts life in the Solovki prison camp as a vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy.