Love is potatoes (2017)

Directed by: Aliona van der Horst | 90 minutes | documentary

Filmmaker Aliona van der Horst (‘Water Children’, ‘Boris Rhyzy’) has a Russian mother and a Dutch father. She doesn’t really know much about her Russian roots. The contact with her mother has never been such that they talked about it at length, and now that Aliona’s mother is paralyzed and unable to speak, Aliona regrets. Through an inheritance – she inherited the wooden house with her nieces and nephews in which her mother grew up with her five sisters and Aliona’s grandmother, Aliona sees opportunities to uncover her family history. The result is ‘Love is potatoes’.

The six sisters may hardly differ in appearance, but their characters are quite different. Each of them has a different way of living and has dealt with the horrors of the Russian regime in their own way. The eldest, Liza, vehemently denies that anything bad was going on (“we led a normal life” and “nothing tragic happened to me”), the other, Lyuba, who has just died, fled first in communist ideals – sleeping only four hours a night because Lenin did – and then she lost herself in religion. And Aliona’s mother Zoja left as fast as she could with her Dutch husband for the free west.

Letters and photos put the pieces of the puzzle of Aliona’s family history into place. The Second World War – in which all classmates of eldest sister Liza who went into the army lost their lives in the first battle -, the loss of her great love, the abortions that Liza committed herself, the starvation winter, the fear of being in a penal colony. to disappear… Everything was in the service of the country, the bright future. People had to efface themselves for the big picture. As two of her children were dying, the overseer demanded that Aliona’s grandmother come to work. They were going to die anyway, so why stay home for that?

When Aliona calls her aunt Valja – the youngest of the bunch – she encounters a wall of unwillingness and mistrust. Phone calls “hurt her ears”, but she doesn’t have a landline. In order to discuss things, she has to meet Aliona, but when Aliona offers to visit her, she indicates that she does not want to. “You don’t understand a starving person with a full belly,” and with those words she ends the conversation. It is also easy to read between the lines during the conversations with niece Tanja and nephew Sasja. ‘Love is potatoes’ has impressive scenes; like the one with the pile of shoes that just grows and grows. Because shoes, you don’t throw them away. What a completely different time it was than the one we live in now.

The hand-drawn black-and-white animations by Italian director Simone Massi artistically show the horrors of history, but do not obscure them. ‘Love is potatoes’ is a beautiful documentary about family, Russia and above all the unconditional, protective love of mothers for her children.