Simply about the Complicated: Why Come back? (A Review of P. Fattakhutdinov’s Film “Finding a Motherland”)

A review of a documentary film by Yekaterinburg director Pavel Fattakhutdinov attempts to provide an analytical interpretation of this work. Using examples of emigrant families from Russia who fled to Harbin after the revolution, the film raises the pressing question of the reasons for the return of these people back to their homeland. Based on historical archives, photographic documents, testimonies of contemporaries, eyewitnesses and direct participants in historical events, the film poses to the audience questions of the existential choice of personal destiny, belonging to a people, and the nature of human destiny. The viewer learns many facts and events of history for the first time, and the director, combining the confessional nature of the narrative and the dry civic pathos of the theme, achieves the effect of an intimate, personal immersion in those events of the past that remain and will always be real.