Turn Your Body to the Sun

Synopsis

The incredible life story of a Tatar Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans Nazis during WWII. Today, his daughter Sana is tracing the path of her silent father, tries to understand what made him the man she knew as a child, through his diaries, various personal and public archives and registries. As she accompanies the daughter in her journey, the filmmaker excavates film archives, to find traces of those millions of Soviet soldiers who were caught in the fire of dictators fighting, who were there but were easily left out of the narrative of the global war. As she “re-appropriates” the archival footage through mixed techniques of double pass, zoom-in and colorization, the filmmaker searches for the soul of the image, for those small and subtle remnants of a massive, yet casually omitted, human tragedy. The deaths of the Soviet prisoners of war constituted the biggest mass murder of the Second World War after the Holocaust. Softly, but determinately the film starts breaking sixty years of silence.

Director Biography

Aliona van der Horst (Moscow, 1970) is a documentary auteur whose oeuvre consists of a wide variety of films with an outspoken filmic style. From the moment she started her career in 1997, many of her poetic documentaries have been internationally awarded and highly appreciated. Her most known works are Turn your body to the sun (2021), Love is Potatoes (2017), Water Children (2011), Boris Ryzhy (2008), Voices of Bam (2006) and The Hermitage Dwellers (2006). The reason for the international appeal of her work is undoubtedly correlated with her very defined style of poetic filmmaking and the international topics she addresses. Van der Horst also frequently appears as a guest lecturer at film festivals and film schools, that welcome her creative and poetic take on documentary filmmaking.