He had been ‘there’. The father of writer Sana Valiulina (born 1964 in Tallinn, emigrated to the Netherlands in 1989) invariably used this euphemism when discussing his captivity in Stalin’s gulag. There: a word to keep his memories of hell at bay as far as possible. The trauma resulted in a lifetime of silence.
Valiulina – appeared early this year The bookkeeper and the superior, her allegory of present-day Russia – therefore knew only the broad outline of the history of her father Sandar. He was recruited for the Red Army in 1942, ended up in German hands, even worked as an interpreter for the Americans after D-Day and was considered a traitor in the eyes of Stalin after the Second World War. Ten years of penal camp was his share, accompanied by millions of compatriots.
Of Turn Your Body to the Sun documentary maker Aliona van der Horst (born in Moscow, raised in the Netherlands) makes a particularly successful attempt to bring this general, anonymous history as close as possible. As she did with her previous documentary, the beautiful Love is potatoes (2017), after the death of her Russian mother, she delved into her own past, so she now investigates Valiulina’s Russian family past.
Turn Your Body to the Sun is carefully constructed from memories of Russian prisoners of war. Colorized archive image of Soviet soldiers surrendering to the Nazis. Men in the gulag crowding each other as they reach for some thrown food. Stalin and Hitler, chiefly responsible for father’s trauma, who take a sip of water before a speech: the sound amplified so that it seems as if you are standing next to them on stage. Photos and magazine articles, personal letters from father to mother.
While Sana Valiulina travels with her sister Dinar by train to eastern Russia, the territory of the former penal camps develops. Turn Your Body to the Sun turns into a lively, intuitive search for meaning in those archive images. Dozens of faces of men who could have been their fathers pass by. With extensive zooms and slow motions, Van der Horst follows Valiulina’s gaze, searching for details that were missing in her father’s stories.
“Everything that happens does not happen to me but to someone else,” Sandar Valiulina wrote in one of his letters. Makes in an impressive way Turn Your Body to the Sun a war history in which the ‘I’ was crushed yet small, intimate and even personal.
Turn Your Body to the Sun
Documentary
Directed by Aliona van der Horst.
93 min., in 27 halls.