Some fifteen thousand Latvian nationals were deported to Siberia in June 1941, charged with suspicion of conspiring against the new regime established when their country was forcibly transformed into one of the USSR’s federate republics.
One was Melānija Vanaga (or Melanie, as she is called here), a journalist whose husband Aleksandrs was a newspaper editor. The family was separated. Aleksanders was transported to the Gulag and executed in 1942—though Melanie did not learn of his death until much later. She and her son Andrejs were sent to a Siberian labor camp, where they remained for sixteen years, allowed to return to their still-occupied country only in 1957, four years following the death of Stalin. Vanaga began to write about her experience shortly thereafter, but the resultant memoir would not be published until 1991, after Latvia declared its independence from the collapsing USSR.
A Latvian companion-piece to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but told from a feminine perspective, it serves as the source for writer-director Viestur Kairish’s 2016 film, which begins with a performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Riga, suggesting the normalcy that preceded the deportation but also signaling the tragedy about to unfold. It is followed immediately by Soviet troops breaking into the Vanaga apartment on June 14 and forcing the family into waiting trains.
The journey of Melanie (Sabine Timoteo) and Andrejs (Edvīns Mekšs) to Siberia is one of brutality and deprivation, marked by a horrific incident in which a mother kills her children and herself along the way—a foreshadowing of the suffering the survivors will endure after their arrival. From this point, the slow-moving film, shot in austere black-and-white, is a record of misery marked by the cruelty of the Soviet guards and the struggle of Melanie to protect her son. It avoids any lightening of mood, presenting the time she spends in Siberia as an endless cycle of hardship during which she nonetheless refuses to surrender hope. Melanie nurses Andrejs through a serious illness and later helps him escape the camp.
After his departure she takes in an elderly prisoner named Jakob (Erwin Leder), helping him to regain his strength and caring for other ill prisoners as well. In order to send a potentially life-saving parcel to her brother, she sells her boots, though doing so forces her to trudge barefoot through the snow.
Watching all of this unfold at a glacial pace is a grim and grueling experience, unrelieved even by Melanie’s eventual return to Riga, where she finally learns of her husband’s death. But it effectively conveys the punishing nature of what was done to her and others, and Timoteo’s performance certainly captures her pain. This is not an inviting film, but it is an honest one. No extras, but a strong optional purchase.