Aliona van der Horst
Aliona van der Horst is a Dutch documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and editor.
Life
Aliona van der Horst was born to a Dutch father and a Russian mother and grew up in the Netherlands. She studied Russian literature at the University of Amsterdam and completed documentary film directing at the . She holds a master's degree in Russian Literature from the University of Amsterdam. During her studies, she worked as a Russian interpreter, which ultimately led her to pursue documentary direction at the Netherlands Film and TV Academy. She graduated in 1997 with The Lady with the White Hat,She has made feature-length documentaries, including Gerlach, Turn your body to the Sun , Love is Potatoes, Water Children, Boris Ryzhy and Voices of Bam. Her work is poetic and visually distinctive, often focussing on art, culture, and personal histories.
Her films have been screened at festivals such as the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Tribeca Festival, True/False Film Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival CPH:Doc,, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Artdocfest and Dok Leipzig.
Van der Horst has had retrospectives of her films at Crossing Europe, Linz, Docudays Kiev, Beldocs international filmfestival and Filmacoteka de Catalunya.
Van der Horst is a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has been a guest tutor at IDFA Project Space Netherlands and International, DocNomads and the Netherlands Film Academy, and given masterclasses at universities and film festivals. She is one of the founders of Docmakers, a collectively-owned, all-female documentary production company.
Critical reception
Dutch film critic and philosopher Dana Linsen has described Van der Horst's films as essayistic and classically documentary, emerging from research and collaboration, and noted the use of artistic interventions to explore absence and presence. Film critic Nicole Sante highlighted Van de Horst's ability to integrate image, sound, music, and dialogue in storytelling, and to find beauty in unexpected places.Filmography
Short films
Memorabilia : explores people's earliest memories and their meanings.The Lady with the White Hat : Focuses on a Ukrainian language teacher who is involved in the dissident movement and punished with confinement in a mental institution.Kiev: The Dissident and the General : two former adversaries working together to heal the trauma of the Stalinist purges.The Little Red Box : a children's documentary about best friends who quarrel over a red box.After the Springs of '68, a Story About Love : about the filmmaker's parents and their experiences during the initial years of their marriage, set against the backdrop of the Cold War.A Passion for the Hermitage : a six-part series about the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, focussing on how staff preserved artworks through war and oppression.Boris Ryzhy : about the poet Boris Ryzhy from Yekaterinburg. Geoffrey McNab in Screen Daily called it "one of the best liked films in the festival".- 15 Attempts : follows artist Suchan Kinochita during a two-week art project in Brussels.