Turn your body to the Sun (2021) Love is Potatoes (2017), Water children (2011), Boris Ryzhy (2008) and Voices of Bam (2006).
Her latest film Gerlach, codirected with Luuk Bouwman, was described by Dutch film critic and philosopher Dana Linssen (2024) in an essay about her work like this:
"Gerlach's farm is like a raindrop that reflects the world"(...). Her works contain many such raindrops. Small mirrors for big stories. Multifaceted reflections on the complexities of the universes around us. Van der Horsts artistic politics are always dispersed in a world of endless possibilities. And no matter how dark and traumatic the subject matters of her films, there are always moments of lightheartedness, of absurdity of humor. Without the absurdity of humor, it is difficult to find emotion. The alternation of humor and gravity makes it bearable".[1]
Filmcritic Nicole Sante wrote in 2024 about her work:
"Aliona van der Horst is a master of cinematography. She can, like no other, tell a story in which image, sound, music and – often sparse – conversations complement and reinforce each other. She finds beauty in places where you wouldn't expect it"[2].
Her previous film Turn your body to theSun is about the forgotten narrative of the second world war: the murder of almost 3 million Soviet prisoners of War. But the treatment of archival footage is what makes the film special. Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw (2024) says:
"Van der Horst uses digitally enhanced silent archival footage with a dramatised voiceover of Sayar's writings; Sana tells us of her agony in trying to glimpse her father's face in this old historical film"[3]
She had retrospectives of her films at Crossing Europe Linz, Austria[6] (2024), Docudays Kiev,[7] Oekraine 2015), Beldocs international filmfestival[8] Belgrado, Serbia (2017) and Filmacoteka de Catalunya,[9] Spain (2013).[10]
She is a member of the AMPAS documentary branch.[11] She is a guest tutor at the IDFA Project Space International,[12] Docnomads,[13] Master of Film at the Dutch film academy[14] and gives masterclasses at universities and filmfestivals.
She is cofounder of the, collectively owned, all-women, documentary production company DOCMAKERS.[15]
Early life
Aliona van der Horst is the daughter of a Dutch father and a Russian mother and grew up in the Netherlands. Her father studied chemistry in Moscow in the 1960s and met her Russian mother, an engineer, in 1967. For almost five years, her mother was denied the right to emigrate to the Netherlands to join her husband.
About this troublesome period, where their private life got mixed up with big politics, Aliona made the documentary After the spring of '68, a story about love' (Dutch title: Na de lente van '68, een kleine liefdesgeschiedenis/ moet dit er in?).' It received the Dutch Academy Award (2002) for Best Dutch TV documentary
Early career
Aliona holds a Master degree in Russian Literature at the University of Amsterdam. During her studies, she worked as an interpreter of Russian, which eventually brought her to study at the Dutch Film and TV Academy in 1993 to direct documentaries, where she graduated in 1997 with the much acclaimed The lady with the white hat, about a Ukrainian language teacher from Odesa who got involved in the dissident underground movement and was punished for this by being locked up in a mental institution. In this film there are contributions from the famous Ukrainian psychiatrist and human right fighter Semen Gluzman. The film deals with the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union for political purposes and was awarded David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award[16] at the International Documentary Association (IDA[17] 1998, Los Angelos, USA, got the Tuschinski Award 1997 and the Silver Spire Award at the San Francisco Film Festival 1998.
Overview of Aliona van der Horsts' themes and films
Dutch film critic and philosopher Dana Linsen (2024) writes in her essay about Aliona van de Horsts' body of work:
"Aliona van der Horsts' films are essayistic and classically documentary at the same time. They arise from thorough research and an observational way of working, often in close collaboration with others. (...) Absence always conjures presence in her films by employing (...) artistic interventions. Often but not exclusively under repressive regimes, for the excavation of the past and liberating perspectives on what it means to be a human. Through these artistic crossovers meditative spaces are created in which the speculative gives voice to the unspeakable".[18]
A PASSION FOR THE HERMITAGE
A passion for the Hermitage (2003)/The hermitage dwellers (2006) is both a 6 part series and a feature doc behind the scenes of the famous Hermitage museum of St Petersburg. The theme of the series is how the employees saved art during war and repression, and also how they themselves were saved by art. The series was successfully broadcast by Dutch public broadcaster AVRO[19]'. A passion for the Hermitage was awarded the Dutch Academy Award/Art and culture in 2003 and the feature documentary 'The Hermitage Dwellers' got the Grand Prize at the Montréal International Festival of Films on Art 2006.
VOICES OF BAM
Van der Horsts' second theatrical feature documentary Voices of Bam (89', 2006) that she co-directed with Maasja Ooms, is been hailed for its innovative style, using 'inner voices' of the inhabitants of the Iranian city of Bam, that was destroyed by an earthquake in 2003. Shot on 16mm on an Arri-mini with a rig, made it possible for the camera to wander like a ghost through the destroyed city. Jay Weissberg (2006) writes in Variety[20] about this doc:
"Using scratched and dust-covered photos to evoke happier times, Dutch directors Aliona van der Horst and Maasja Ooms give an impressionistic rendering of life in a destroyed city in Voices of Bam'....Despite docu's amorphous structure, pic remains a poetic essay on loss and the difficulties of rebirth, making it ideal fest fare".[21].
It received the Special Jury award at Trebeca International film festival, the Interreligious award at Vision de Reél, the Grand Documentary Prize at Docfest Prizren, among other awards.
BORIS RYZHY
Her next documentary Boris Ryzhy (59', 2008) about the Russian poet of the perestroika, was made in close collaboration with Maasja Ooms and deals with the search for the reasons of the poets' suicide in 2001. It premiered at IDFA where Geoffrey Macnab in Screendaily[22] wrote that it was 'one of the best liked films in the festival' and got the IDFA Midlength doc award in 2008.
Film critic Marina Akhmetzhanova (2022) wrote:
"Starting off as an exploration of the poet's life and death, the film becomes as much a portrait of his home of Yekaterinburg and Russia as a whole, as a portrait of Ryzhy himself. In particular, the director explores Russia as both the place that gave birth to Ryzhy and shaped his poetic sensibility, and the place that, as she suggests, eventually killed him".[23]
Dana Linssen (2024) writes in her essay:
"After the death of her father, she recently found a student film in which she interviews people about their first memories. It was perhaps the missing link to realize how important the themes of time, memory and recollection are in her works. In her first major film, a portrait of the Russian poet Boris Ryzhy (2008), who died young, she had nothing but vague black-and-white images and memories of his family and friends to build her film on. That and his words, that describe a time of transition".[1]
Festivals and Awards Boris Ryzhy
Edinburgh Filmfestival, Great Britain 2009, Best Feature Documentary Award
Montréal, International festival of films on Art, Canada 2009 Jury Prize
Netherlands Film Festival, Dutch Film Critics award, nominee golden calf Best Editing (Maasja Ooms)
International Film Festival, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, worldpremiere
IDFA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2009, Silver Wolf award
WATER CHILDREN
Water Children (73' 2011) premiered in the International competition of Dok Leipzig and got a special mention there and was awarded the Feature Documentary award at DOXA. It was the opening film of International Women Documentary festival in Cairo and of EDOC festival in Quito, Ecuador, which is a brave festival choice as it deals with taboo topics like menstruation and childlessness. It is a portrait of multidisciplinary artist Tomoko Mukaiyama, the installation of 12,000 white dresses in a rural Japanese town, the biological cycles of life and death, and a mature and forgiving meditation on the great unanswerable questions.
The film was praised by Dutch film critic Gawie Keyser (2011):
"An unforgettable, claustrophobic film (...) as sensuous as Werner Herzog's early work, or everything by Terrence Malick, especially his latest film Tree of Life. All these films explore the meaning of universal themes around life and death, birth and degeneration in a visual, poetic way. Watching it represents in itself a ritual, almost a kind of mourning, or an extended moment of the sublime".[24]
Dutch filmcritic Floortje Smit (2011) described the filmmakers' place in this film:
"A wonderful paradox: By giving herself a prominent place, she actually cancels herself out in this bittersweet documentary".[25]
Dutch filmcritic Dana Linssen (2024) wrote about the taboo of menstruation in this film:
"Van der Horst is a documentary filmmaker of the observing school. It is not about the I of the maker, but about the other. When she then does film her own hands, it already feels like a violation of her fragile private domain. You catch your breath from so much intimacy. Just as reluctantly, she films the testimonies of the women who collaborated on the project and donated their menstrual blood for what became a grand epic about motherhood, miscarriages and menopause. Through that way of discovery and observation that is as searching as it is confident, she penetrates what is probably still one of the biggest taboos, menstruation, and with it Van der Horst's own movingly sincere thoughts about what femininity and womanhood actually mean".[18]
Love is potatoes (90', 2017) is Aliona van der Horsts' most personal work. It premiered in the International Competition of Dok Leipzig, receiving an Honorable Mention and the Interreligious Jury Award.
It was awarded the Golden Calf for Best Feature Documentary at the Netherlands Film festival and the Chrystal film award for a successful cinema release in the Netherlands. In the academic paper Filial Care and Familial Postmemory (2023) Melinda Blos-Jáni writes about the concept of Postmemory in the film:
"Despite severing the head of the hydra of indexicality – i.e. avoiding the evidential use of photography and other media, the metaleptic jump into the world of animation preserves the markers of materiality, by using highly abstract, yet haptic images. Through these conjunctions the film mediates the traumatic experiences of Russian women under socialism, but also positions the filmmaker as a woman who takes care of this past as postmemory, through collecting and archiving not just images but also producing haptic postmemory objects, such as her film"..[32]
The film deals with intergenerational trauma, as Dutch filmcritic Coen van Zwol (2017) writes in the newspaper NRC, where it also got a five star rating:
"The central question of Love is Potatoes is formulated by Aliona's cousin Tania:"What has life done to our mothers?" It is a personal document that painfully exposes the emotional gap between Russia and the West, between needy mothers and prosperous daughters, within the 36 square meters of the wooden shack near Moscow where her mother and aunts grew up".[33].
Festivals and Awards Love is Potatoes
DOK Leipzig for Documentary and Animated Film, Germany 2017, won the International Competition, the Interreligious Jury Award, Honorary Mention in the International Competition
Artdocfest-Russian Open Documentary Film Festival,[5] Russia 2018 Won: Grand Prix
Meetings in Siberia-International Festival of Documentary Films,[43] Russia 2018, Official Selection
Astra Film Festival,[44] Romania 2018, competition | La Orquídea Film Festival, Ecuador 2018, Out of competition: Gender Section
Panorama Internacional Coisa de Cinema,[45] Brazil 2018, won Best Feature Film
Beirut International Women's Film Festival,[46] Lebanon 2019, won Best Documentary
Femcine9,[47] Chile 2019, won Best Feature Length | Animavì-Animation Cinema And Poetic Art Festival, Italy 2019
FIDBA[48] - Buenos Aires International Documentary Film Festival, Argentina 2019, Official Selection
History Film Festival,[49] Croatia 2019, Official Selection, won Grand Prix.
TURN YOUR BODY TO THE SUN
Her next film, Turn your body to the sun (2021, 90') also deals with the traumatic past of the Soviet heritage, through the eyes of a daughter searching for her fathers' past. It's An evocation of a time when man's cruelty seemed to know no bounds, or repercussions as Fionnuala Halligan writes in ScreenDaily[50] And Peter Bradsaw writes in the Guardian (2024):
"Dutch Estonian novelist Sana Valiulina investigates the life of her father who was compelled to betray Stalin's Soviet Union by serving the Nazi war machine (...) it is an extraordinary tale, arguably worthy of Boris Pasternak and David Lean'. The leap between the present and the past, between the first person docu footage and the archival images result in poetic, essayistic visuals, and create incongruous moods on the level of spectatorship. While the personal archiveology becomes a narrative stimuli for the filmmaker immersed in his/her own story, they also elicit "another kind of empathy" with a wider, collective appeal for the viewer".[3]
Modern Time review by Carmen Grey writes in Modern times (2021):
"Though Sana has lived in the Netherlands for thirty years and is used to communicating in Dutch, she prefers to speak in Russian for the film — as she puts it, because she wants her father to understand her. The notion that Turn Your Body to the Sun is a dialogue not only with the audience but with an ancestor now deceased in order to come to terms with their life underscores that documentary cinema not only records the past but has the cathartic potential to reconfigure its meaning and heal its legacy of trauma. As she addresses her father as a traitor, we sense her complex relationship to his actions, which are difficult to justify on moral grounds, and made more incomprehensible by a prevailing culture of silence and shame. The limits of possible resistance, and the ultimate culpability of the state for the lack of a future left to men who had been drafted against their will and risked their lives in an operation they had not been able to win, are thorny areas the documentary presents with frank openness but makes no pretense of ethically resolving. By the close of this powerful exploration into the meaning of allegiance and identity in wartime, one question by Sana's father remains hanging in the air: «Did I betray my fatherland? Or was I betrayed by my fatherland"?[51]
Dutch film critic Coen van Zwol writes (2022):
"Turn Your Body to the Sun is a 'Vatersuche', a monument to the monstrously treated prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. As such, it is a kind of counterpoint to 'Muttersuche' Love is Potatoes, a monument to Russian peasantry. The latter film revolved around fundamental misunderstanding between Aliona, who grew up in the Netherlands, and her stubborn mother Zoya, and focused on the 36 square metres of a peasant house where her mother and aunts grew up - you could almost smell the damp and mould. Instead, in Turn Your Body to the Sun, everything is in motion, just like father Sandar at the time. We see Sana and her sister Dinar on the train or metro talking about the traumas he kept silent about. Out of guilt or shame, because he preferred to forget".[52]
Festivals and AwardsTurn your body to the sun
Turn your body to the sun was nominated for the Prix Italia 2023[53]
Muestra de Cine Internacional Memoria Verdad Justicia,[63] Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala, 2023
Crossing Europe Film Festival, Linz, Austria 2024.[64]
GERLACH, the last farmer
Gerlach (76', 2023) is a first collaboration with Dutch director Luuk Bouwman and was five years in the making. It is Aliona van der Horsts' first feature film in the Netherlands. It got the Chrystal film award for arthouse cinema success.
GERLACH is a loving and humorous portrait of arable farmer Gerlach, who has been farming in the shadow of Amsterdam Airport for sixty years. Around him, he has seen everything change. His simple wooden house is now wedged in between a Shell petrol station, a McDonalds outlet and various distribution centers. With great dedication he cares for his beets and grains, while property developers eye his land and climate change disrupts his harvest. Despite everything that comes his way, Gerlach stands tall with his down-to-earth humor, helped by his loving brothers and friends. His little house is the raindrop in which the world is reflected, existentialist and absurdist.[65]
Festivals and Awards
IDFA, The Netherlands 2023, Winner best Dutch Documentary Award
Crystel Film Award 2023, The Netherlands
Nominated for Duth Directors Award (DDG)
Crossing Europe Film festival, Linz Austria 2024
Biografilm festival, Italy 2024, Nominated
Documentarist Istanbul Documentary Days, Turkey 2024
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