In the Crosswind

It's a great film, but it's most definitely not for everyone.

It employes a highly unusual structure. It's told mostly through a series of live tableaus, various moments "frozen" in place, accompanied by a woman's letters read out in voiceover narration, as the camera weaves in and out of the scene, gliding past characters posed in freeze frame postures. At times, it feels more like performance art or a museum exhibition, and it easily could have been a cheap gimmick. But the filmmakers have performed a near miracle and instead of a cheap gimmick, they've produced something genuinely moving. It is haunting and heartbreaking. The film does demand some patience, but that patience is rewarded.

Here's some historical context:

In June 1940, while the Western European powers are preoccupied with the catastrophe of Dunkirk and the collapse of France, the Soviet Union swiftly and quietly occupies the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. A year later, beginning on June 14, 1941, Soviet forces carry out mass deportations of people from throughout the Baltic region to their new lives as prisoners/serfs/slaves in Siberia. This was just one part of Stalin's systematic dismantling of local/indigenous sources of power, authority, and legitimacy in every territory Moscow controlled. It is also a small part of the decades-long program of ethnic cleansing and "Russification" of Soviet-conquered and Soviet-occupied lands. The euphemism they used was "population transfers".