Every human being has the right to know where they came from and where their family lies buried.

This unshakable conviction is what drives Yuri Dmitriev (1956), who never knew his own biological parents.

After years of searching the pine forests of northwestern Russia, he discovers a mass grave containing thousands of victims of Stalin’s “Great Purge” of 1937. Thanks to Yuri, their next of kin finally find out what happened to their lost relatives, who were secretly executed here in the 1930s and left behind in pits. Amid the trees where these executions took place, a place of remembrance comes into being where, after decades of swallowing their profound grief, the surviving relatives can finally give free rein to it.

Together with his 11-year-old foster daughter, Natasha, and his dog, Gresha, Yuri continues to search the forest, but the Russian authorities are increasingly intolerant of his work. On state television he is portrayed as someone tarnishing the country’s history. It does not surprise Yuri. “Why is all of this happening? Because we’re on the same road as before. And we know how this road ended.” Then one day, following an anonymous complaint, he is charged with taking pornographic pictures of his foster daughter. And arrested. At the end of a long drawn-out and utterly erratic trial, Yuri, after shining a light on victims of repression for decades, is himself sent to a penal colony. He gets 15 years. While we follow Yuri’s life, archive footage brings the Stalin era and the 1990s to life – not as past history, but as an unresolved trauma deeply influencing contemporary Russia. Unexpectedly intimately, the filmmaker tells us a story we mainly know from afar: how a state rewrites history and what this means for its citizens.