The Past and Its Presence: A Study of Multidirectional Memory in Akhtem Seitablaiev’s <i>87 Children</i> (2017)
Journal: East European Jewish Affairs
Year: 2021

This article examines Akhtem Seitablaiev’s 2017 film, 87 Children, which depicts Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars through the prism of another genocide – the Nazis’ 1941–1943 murder of Crimean Jews. It uses Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory to illustrate how the history of the Holocaust, Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and the personal story of the film’s protagonists conflate in Seitablaiev’s work in an attempt both to foreground silenced pasts and