The film tells the stories of Crimean Tatars who returned to their homeland half a century after their forced deportation by Stalin’s regime on 18 May 1944. At the heart of the film is an interview with Besibe Aksakova, an activist in the Crimean Tatar movement. She shares her own experience of exile and reflects on how, in her life story, the statuses of “war heroine” and “enemy of the people” were paradoxically combined.
The film has been digitised from a 35mm positive print using a Blackmagic Cintel Scanner in 2026 by the Dovzhenko Centre Film Laboratory in cooperation with NGO Docudays, with financial support from the European Union.
CREW:
Director: Rafail Nakhmanovych
Production
Ukrainian Studio of Chronicle and Documentary Films / Українська студія хронікально-документальних фільмів
Director
Rafail Nakhmanovych
Rafail Nakhmanovych (1927–2009) was a Ukrainian documentary film director and an Honoured Artist of the Ukrainian SSR. Starting in 1954, he worked at the Ukrkinochronika studio. In 1966, his crew captured on film an unauthorised rally at Babyn Yar involving Ivan Dziuba and Viktor Nekrasov, for which the director was persecuted by the KGB. He worked in the genre of “film confession,” focusing on personal memory as a counterweight to official Soviet propaganda. He was the author of more than 30 films, including Son of a Soldier (1962), Subject to Appeal (1966), Diary of an Old Doctor (1981), Jewish Cemetery (1989), Viktor Nekrasov at Liberty and at Home (1991), and The Past?... (1995).Selected Filmography
Son of a Soldier (1962),
Subject to Appeal (1966),
Diary of an Old Doctor (1981),
Jewish Cemetery (1989),
Viktor Nekrasov at Liberty and at Home (1991), and
The Past?... (1995)
