Father’s letters

The Russian meteorologist Alexei Vangengheim, who was once a respected government official and loyal member of the Communist Party, fell victim to a Stalinist purge in 1934. Named a ‘traitor to the motherland’, Vangengheim was sent to a gulag on the Solovetsky Islands and executed three years later in 1937, before being posthumously ‘rehabilitated’ by the Soviet Union in 1956. The powerful short Father’s Letters illustrates the letters that Vangengheim had sent his daughter Elya from the gulag, in which he pretended to be on an expedition to study how plant life could persist in the desolate Arctic to protect her from the truth, with hand-crafted animations. In doing so, the Russian filmmaker Alexey Evstigneev draws out a profound metaphor for both the fragility and persistence of human life while giving a powerful voice to one of the hundreds of thousands killed during the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938.