In her 25 years of filmmaking Aliona van der Horst has received multiple awards for her films. Because of her personal, poetic and cinematic vision, her films are profoundly compelling and touching. Her most recent film, Turn your body to the sun (2021) deals with history and memory through the story of a daughter searching for her father’s past and is hailed for its artistic use of archival footage (www.turnyourbodytothesun.com). Love is Potatoes (2017) is a first-person doc that deals with post-memory in contemporary Russia. It won a number of awards, including the Dutch Oscar in 2018. Two other films, Water Children and After the Spring of ‘68, are first-person docs. Her films revolve around the question of how ordinary people’s lives are shaped by big historical events. Retrospectives of her work were held in Barcelona, Kyiv and Belgrade. She is a member of the Documentary branch of AMPAS and the European Film Academy.
