Turn Your Body to the Sun
In 2017, Dutch-Russian director Aliona van der Horst made a big impression with her documentary Love is Potatoes, in which she delved into Russia's past on the basis of her own family history. In her new film, Turn Your Body to the Sun, she again focuses on the Russian past, this time with the story of a man who was imprisoned in one of Stalin's gulags for ten years. She uses colour images from the war, personal letters, drawings and photographs to shape this story.
Sana Valiulina and her sister Dinar knew that their father Sandar had been in one of Stalin's prison camps after WWII, but he never told about it. He was one of the five million Russians who were held as prisoners of war by the Nazis. Many succumbed to hardship, the survivors awaited a terrible fate: Stalin considered them traitors and sent them to the gulags; Sandar spent ten years there. Sana wants to know what happened to him during those years.
