Turn Your Body to the Sun

Netherlands 2021, 93 min, Russian and Dutch, Hebrew & English subtitles

When he was 19, Sandar found himself between Stalin and Hitler. He was one of millions of Soviet soldiers who were sent to fight the Nazis, captured, and then, condemned as traitors by their homeland for coming back alive, sent to labor camps in Siberia. When he returned to Moscow 14 years later, he refused to talk. Now, his daughter, Sana, tries to piece together what happened to him during and after the war using his diaries and letters to her mother. She searches the colorized archive footage for the face of the youth he had been before he became her silent father. She finds others like him, young men captured in the Battle for Smolensk or elsewhere, who were passed from hand to hand, from the Germans to the Americans and back to Mother Russia—toy soldiers in the hands of the great powers.

Previous Festivals: IDFA

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