Aliona van der Horst (Voices of Bam, EIFF 2006) has a talent for unearthing beauty in devastation. In …Bam, she wove an atmospheric portrait of a bereaved community, sifting through rubble to salvage fragments from their lives before a cataclysmic earthquake. In Boris Ryzhy, she selects a more personal subject, building a visionary lament for a Russian poet who killed himself in 2001, leaving a wife and son. Van der Horst starts with moments of intimately humane realism, and then uses small gestures – a subtle shift in camera angle, perhaps; a deft edit; a delicate musical grace note – to ratchet the film's register into pure poetry. Much of the picture focuses upon Ryzhy's widow and son, as they share memories of the dead poet, and as the widow accompanies the filmmaker on a quest through Soviet-era tower blocks to find anyone who remembers Ryzhy. These beautifully observed segments use conventionally realist documentary shooting: tasteful handheld camerawork, interviews, and so on. What's extraordinary is the impact van der Horst achieves by embedding these personal sequences in a context of acutely compositional, masterfully edited scenes that establish a hallucinatory sense of place. An interview might cut, for example, to a haunting slow-motion image of an old drunkard leering toothlessly as he sways on a swing in a deserted, snow-filled playground. Van der Horst's use of poetic place-making to gloss personal testimony is profoundly moving. She develops this approach further. In one sequence, grave-portraits of murdered gangsters appear in metronomic montage (Ryzhy grew up amongst these cutthroats, who shaped his worldview and his poetry). The grave-portraits cut directly into an identically timed montage of found Super-8 footage, depicting cheerful young men. They're the same individuals, we imagine, and the sadness of their violent deaths emerges forcefully when we see their smiling faces. This rhythmic montage of similar shots – a hypnotic dirge with powerful visual grammar – recalls Viktar Dashuk's best work. Like Dashuk, and like Ryzhy in his poems, van der Horst achieves a palpable sense of grandeur in misery. Only a handful of documentarists currently work at this level; it is an honour to present her work again at EIFF.