"17th of August" - Description
A long way from Moscow, amid the forests of the Russian North, between Vologda and Archangel, on an island lying in one of the lakes, in an Orthodox monastery built in the sixteenth century. In Soviet times this monastery was converted into a harsh regime prison, as were many all over the whole country, because after the acceptance of the death penalty moratorium in 1993 it was there that the first prisoners for life went. Currently there are 142 prisoners there. One of them, Boris Bezoteczestwo, is the hero of the film. Boris has been sentenced to life imprisonment for triple murder.
The film tells of one day in the life of a man, who now will never leave his cell. We observe not only routine activities, such as the prisoner performs every day. Primarily we accompany him in ceaseless consideration, of what he succeeded and what he failed to achieve before committing the crime, in his prayers and discussions with God, and also in returning to occurrences, which once seemed to him to be completely ordinary, and today seem distant and completely unreal.
It is interesting how the convict creates his imaginations of reality that is already inaccessible to him. The film shows prison life, the external world, which the convict does not see, but its echoes reach him in the form of fragmentary words of the guards, incidental sounds and noises. From these fragments the hero creates for himself an image of the world, from which he came but to which he shall now never return.