Turn Your Body to the Sun

2021 • 93m

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.

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