Bespredel

In a Soviet prison the order runs on informing: the governor rules by forcing prisoners to denounce each other. The hierarchy inside sits on top of that. A new inmate arrives, said to be in for speculating in postage stamps, and refuses to go along with the arrangement. The price of resisting comes from the administration and from the cell block alike. Igor Gostev's film came out in 1989 and rests on a piece of journalism published in the magazine Ogonyok. Showing the penal system this directly was new in the glasnost period. The telling makes nobody a hero; the prisoners are not innocent and the system is not the work of one bad man. The film's title means lawlessness and limitlessness in Russian.