Culture

You Better Work: Siberian Prison Beauty Contest

by Jordan Yerman | March 12, 2008 at 07:58 am

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A fascinatingly surreal story: female inmates in a Siberian prison engage in an annual beauty contest in order to demonstrate eligibility for parole. The stakes involved make Girlicious and Next Top Model look even sillier. Modelling contract? Whatever- how about release from a Siberian work camp?

Miss Gulag, a documentary film on this event, premiered at last year's Berlin Film Festival, and aired on BBC yesterday.

She wears a candy-pink, cotton ball gown. At her feet, three other women sew tiny flowers along the hem of her giant hoop skirt.

Her lips are painted bright red and light brown curls frame her face.

"A woman should always be beautiful," says Natalya Khapova, 26, as she poses on her pedestal.

"Not just outside the fence. Even if she's in here, she should show her beauty. A woman is everything gentle and wonderful - or she should be."

The fence Khapova refers to surrounds the correctional facility UF 91/9, an all-women's prison camp some 20 miles away from the Siberian capital, Novosibirsk.

Her ball gown is one of three outfits she will don for the prison's main event of the year - the annual "Miss Spring" beauty contest.