_{Turn Your Body to the Sun by Aliona van der Horst}

In the opening scenes of Aliona van der Horst’s Turn Your Body to the Sun, the film’s core protagonist Sana Valiulina figuratively wears the Second World War on her skin. She is standing before a film projection of Nazi footage of captured Soviet soldiers, and all the time she is looking for her father Sandar, whom she never finds, other than in the faces of every soldier she sees on screen.

To be captured as a POW was considered tantamount to treasonous by Stalin, and even though the war for Sandar ended relatively well after he fled to the American forces during the D-Day landings, the Yalta Conference offered him no salvation as Stalin demanded repatriation of all Soviet POWs. Churchill and Roosevelt, we are told in the film, were in no doubt as to the harsh treatment that awaited these soldiers, whether they be shot, imprisoned or sent to the gulags.

And all of this after the inhuman treatment they were subjected to by the Nazis during the war itself. “Second only to the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy,” says Van der Horst, pointing out that 3.3 million Soviet POWs were starved to death during the conflict.

Incarcerated after WW2 in the extreme cold of Siberia, and forced to undertake Sisyphean tasks of hard labour, Sandar nevertheless managed to correspond by mail with Sana’s mother Tagira, and the pair fell in love through their letters. After eight years they finally met and married, but Sandar was always a troubled soul, and even after the birth of their two daughters, he remained aloof and silent about his past, and his family had to endure his dark moods.

In the film, Sana and her sister Dinar attempt to fill in the gaps of her father’s life, and embark on a train journey to the frozen wastelands of Siberia to walk again in his footsteps, piecing together the familial jigsaw puzzle like a pair of latter-day sleuths.

Van der Horst’s film “re-appropriates” (to use a term coined by Portuguese filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias) German and Russian WW2 archive and elevates it out of standard quotidien usage. The director colorizes the black and white footage, such as of Stalin and Hitler and of countless POWs. She underlines how she wanted to depict the war in colour, using only colour archival footage, but what was available was not sufficient. So as not to disturb the “phantasmagoric atmosphere” of the existing colour images she then used an algorithm to colour the other monochrome archival footage in similar colour tones.

This “phantasmagoria” is exemplified by the powerful footage she discovered, shot behind the Soviet lines in Belarus, which rawly depicts a war fought by hand and with horses, as opposed to with tanks and artillery or other mechanised means. “I am amazed by how strong colour, with its pictorial abstraction, affects emotional perception,” says Van der Horst.

Furthermore, the “re-appropriation” of the archive entails her zooming in, looping or slowing it down, all the time working it to reveal “the soul of the image, [looking] for those small and subtle remnants of a massive, yet casually omitted, human tragedy,” she further expresses in her film notes.

The most striking instances of this are when she isolates the faces of prisoners of war who are gazing straight into the camera, wearing expressions of shame, sorrow, fatigue or plain curiosity.

There are two “searches” in the film, Van der Horst underlines. There is Sana’s search for a father whom she wants to understand. What turned him into the difficult, taciturn man she came to know as a child, and later as a woman? And there is the director’s own search within the archive to tell the universal story of the men who shared Sandar’s fate to be stripped of their individuality, and her desire to “give them back their stories.”

It is a film with contemporary resonance, she adds. “I am convinced that Russia’s unresolved past strongly determines the present. My last film, Love is Potatoes, dealt with Stalin’s inhuman treatment of the peasants and the resulting intergenerational traumas of my own peasant family. In this film, I take a look at another part of Russian history: the fate of the prisoners of war, but always against the background of the ways in which history influences the present.”

Protagonist Sana also quotes the poet Joseph Brodsky who wrote how when our parents die we become “consequences without an initial cause.” In Turn Your Body to the Sun she therefore sets out to bridge the existential void between herself and her past, to understand her connection with the world and to rediscover that very cause of which she is a vital, probing and articulate consequence.

Turn Your Body to the Sun is produced by Docmakers. It is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive.