Purge

Antti Jokinen : 2012
Puhdistus

A story following two generations of women in Estonia, from before the Stalinist deportations in 1949 until after the country's independence in 1991, intertwining the lives of Aliide, a villager, and Zara, a victim of human trafficking, linked by separate tales of deceit, desperation and fear. Aliide has experienced the horrors of the Stalin era and the deportation of Estonians to Siberia, but she herself has to cope with the guilt of opportunism and even manslaughter. One night in 1992 she finds a young woman in the courtyard of her house; Zara has just escaped from the claws of the Russian mafia who held her as a sex slave. Aliide later discovers that the girl is related to her. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distil each other's motives. Gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that unfolded during the worst years of Estonia's Soviet occupation.