Authors

Judith Pallot¹;  ¹ Aleksanteri Institute, Finland

Discussion

“Wardens’ Garden” is a unique film in which former prison officers reminisce about their work in Khony, Georgia in the last decade of the USSR. The film is inspired by studies of historical memory, its transmission and, in particular, the legacy of the Gulag, aspects of the spread of prison culture throughout the body of the former Soviet Union. Khony was the location of five correctional labour colonies based on tea plantation that was just one piece of the vast penal monolith run by the Soviet prison system. The film tells the story of Tsulukidze ITK no.46 through the memory of the people who lived in and worked in the colony in the last decade of the Soviet era.