Father’s Letters

Moscou, 1934. Professor Alexei Wangenheim, the creator of the meteorological service of the USSR, was arrested by the Soviet political police. His daughter Elya was only 4 years old at the time. A close associate of Wangenheim had accused the professor of being the organizer of a conspiracy and falsifying weather forecasts. He was sent to the Gulag on the Solovetsky Islands, a former monastery turned into a prison, where an unprecedented experiment in "reeducation" of humans, animals, and nature was conducted. Hoping to shield his daughter from the harsh realities of repression and believing in his imminent release and return, he decided not to tell the truth and sent letters with drawings and herbariums, as if his imprisonment was one grand adventure, and he was a scientist-explorer. But as his journey drags on, Elya is confronted with the harsh reality. She must then choose where her loyalty lies: with her father or with the motherland.

Director’s statement
In 2018, I discovered Wangenheim’s story, a meteorologist falsely imprisoned in the Gulag in 1934, through an exhibition. Until his execution, he wrote to his daughter, inventing an expedition to protect her childhood.

From this, I made a short film, but the 12min. format proved too limited for the historical and symbolic scope of the story. A feature became necessary to fully explore the personal correspondence and the vast system of Soviet repression.

The film expands into the 30s Soviet “experiment,” where humans and nature are reshaped. The Gulag becomes a moral space where each character must choose between complicity, survival, and humanity.

Animation creates a poetic space where reality and imagination merge. The father’s letters become both refuge and illusion, between violence and childhood wonder.

This feature is an extension and transformation of the short: it keeps its emotional core while opening a wider space where intimacy confronts ideology and historical collapse.