June 14, 1941, 3 a.m. Over 40000 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are deported by Soviets to Siberia. Among them is a philosophy student Erna, a happily married mother of a little girl. Separated from her husband, Erna and her daughter are dispatched together with other women and children to remote Siberian territories. Despite hunger, fear and brutal humiliation Erna never in next fifteen years loses her sense of freedom and hope of returning to homeland.
In the Crosswind is a 2014 Estonian drama film directed by Martti Helde. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. The film is about the forced deportation by Stalin's Soviet Union of an Estonian family to Siberia in the June deportation. It is based on a real-life diary from the period and uses a long sequence of "living tableaus" for the main narrative to invoke the frozen nature of traumatizing events in an individual memory.
