A humorous and loving portrait of an old-school crop farmer who cheerfully weathers life’s headwinds.

The incredible life story of a Tatar Soviet soldier who was captured by the German Nazis during World War II. Today, his daughter Sana is tracing the path of her silent father, trying 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, the filmmaker searches for the soul of the image, for those small and subtle remnants of a massive, yet casually omitted, human tragedy.

One day, Dutch film maker van der Horst was given her inheritance: 6 square meters, one sixth of a small, wooden house in the Russian countryside where her mother grew up. It was as if life had handed her a card she felt forced to play.

Russian Poet Boris Ryzhy was handsome, talented and famous. So why did he end his own life at the age of 26? A quest to find the answer takes the filmmaker to the notorious neighbourhood in the cold industrial city of Yekaterinenburg where Boris grew up...

It tells of Simon, a Dutch communist student in Moscow, who meets and marries the Russian Zoya in the spring of 1968. Simon returns to the Netherlands, expecting his wife to follow shortly afterwards when her exit visa is granted. Her application however is refused over and over again. Months pass and then years. A child is born to Zoya in Moscow: director Aliona van der Horst relates her parents' struggle in this tender account of family history caught up in international politics. In the numerous love-letters to his beloved Zoya he writes : 'Our happiness depends on how the political wind blows'.