Aliona van der Horst’s documentary tells an impossibly painful and sad story from the second world war; it is an extraordinary tale, arguably worthy of Boris Pasternak and David Lean. It is presented by Dutch Estonian novelist Sana Valiulina, born in Soviet-era Tallinn and resident in Amsterdam since 1989. All her life, she reveals, she has been obsessed with the memory of her father, Sayar, a cold and distant figure when she was growing up, because for 15 years after the war he had been imprisoned in the gulag and made to internalise a grotesque sense of shame for having...