Contre-jour de Sibérie

Vladimir Ablamsky (82) has a miraculous life behind him. After his schooldays in Belgium he returned to his birthplace, the city of Harbin in Manchuria, the northeastern part of China. He had two passions: photography and figure-skating, until the Red Army invaded Manchuria in 1945 and Ablamsky's future radically changed. He was sentenced to twenty years in a Siberian penal colony. When he was finally released in 1956, he decided to stay in Siberia. All those years, even in the Gulag, he continued making pictures. In the late seventies, he won a prize at a photography festival in Leipzig. He pays a visit to his dying mother in Sydney en returns to his Siberian hamlet, six hundred miles north of Irkutsk. If he takes a stroll outside the village he has to be careful not to fall into the ditches that are full of human bones; remnants of Stalinism. Come along on a journey through Vladimir Ablamsky's book of photographs.