On the island of Ognenny, a 16th-century monastery became a Soviet gulag after the 1917 revolution and, since 1994, has operated as Vologodski Pyatak, a maximum security prison holding terrorists, gunmen, and mafia bosses serving life sentences. Reporter Christoph Wanner becomes the first Western television journalist granted access behind its walls, filming inmates in their cells, guards on patrol, and the isolation blocks where the most dangerous prisoners are kept apart from the rest of the population. Interviews with prisoners and staff lay out the daily routine inside a facility nicknamed the Island of the Damned, along with the history that turned a place of prayer into a place of punishment. The film moves through the fortress's transformation across four centuries, from religious retreat to political prison camp to today's high-security regime, using on-site footage and firsthand testimony rather than reenactment. It is a rare look inside one of Russia's most restricted institutions.