Aliona van der Horst

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, Gerlach (2023) codirected with Luuk Bouwman won the IDFA Best Dutch Doc award in 2023, was seen by 25000 people in Dutch arthouse cinemas and is touring the international festivals. Her previous film Turn your body to the sun (2021) deals with history and memory through the story of a daughter searching for her fathers’ past and is hailed for its artistic use of archival footage. 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 Golden Calf 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, Belgrade and Linz. She is a member of the Documentary branch of AMPAS and the European Film Academy. She is one of the founders of the collectively owned Dutch film production company DOCMAKERS.