The incredible story of a soldier of Tatar descent who was captured by the Nazis in World War II. Now his daughter Sana, through his diaries and various personal and public archives and registers, tries to trace back the trail of her silent father.
As she accompanies Sana on her quest, director Aliona van der Horst (Love is Potatoes) also digs out film archives to find traces of the millions of Soviet soldiers who lay in the line of fire of warring dictators; those who were there but were conveniently omitted from the story of the global war.
By reusing the archive material using mixed techniques such as double-pass, zooming in and colouring, the filmmaker seeks the soul of the image – the small, subtle remnants of an extensive, but casually erased human tragedy. Cautiously but determinedly, this history unfolds in a film that breaks sixty years of silence.
