Over the past fifteen years, Ukrainian cinema has received great acclaim at interna- tional film festivals, yet its coverage in anglophone academia remains a niche subject. This cluster calls scholars’ attention to the fact that Ukrainian cinema—past and present—still awaits the kind of sustained academic attention that it deserves. Featuring interviews with scholars, archivists, and filmmakers, as well as two research papers on post-Euromaidan films and war documentaries, this cluster articulates new paths to reimagine the history and historiography of the country’s film industry, while at the same time foregrounding the country’s heroic struggle to preserve its cultural legacy. Ultimately, the cluster invites readers to question the colonial designation of Ukrainian cinema as peripheral, to create new interpretative frameworks for Ukrainian films by comparing them with Western and Eastern European counterparts, to recog- nize the historical moment of the post-Euromaidan Ukrainian New Film Wave, and to empathize with the country’s cinematic response to the Russian invasion.

Ana Hedberg Olenina is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Media Studies at Arizona State University. Her main research focus is the Soviet avant-garde, while her broader interests lie at the juncture of international cinema, history of psychology and media theory, with an emphasis on historical configurations of spectators’ experience and immersive environments. Her book Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Russian and American Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2020) was awarded the Wayne Vucinich Prize (ASEEES) and Best First Book (AATSEEL). Her essays on Modern dance, Soviet cinema, and applications of neuroscience in film studies have appeared in journals such as Discourse, Film History, Apparatus, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski and several anthologies.

This interview with a leading scholar of Eastern European cinema, Dina Iordanova, highlights the masterpieces of the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s–1970s and calls attention to the repressive mechanisms in the Soviet film industry which restricted the international and domestic audiences’ access to auteur films produced in Ukrainian studios. Inviting scholars to dig deeper into the history of these films’ pro- duction and distribution, Iordanova also compares the aesthetic of the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema to acclaimed contemporaneous films from Western and Eastern Europe in order to underscore Ukrainian filmmakers’ original innovations.

This interview was recorded by Ana Hedberg Olenina, and annotated by Ana Hedberg Olenina and Dina Iordanova.

Dina Iordanova is Emeritus Professor of Global Cinema at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she has been based since 2004. She has taught at various leading universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. A specialist on the cinema of the Balkans and East Central Europe, her mono- graphs include Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media (2001), Emir Kusturica (2002), and Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film (2003), among others. She pioneered work on international film festivals and has published numerous chapters and articles on East European and Soviet cinema, transnational film, documentary film, and Asian cinema. She is a native of Bulgaria.

In this interview, Oleksandr Teliuk, the Head of the Archive Department of the Olek- sandr Dovzhenko National Center, Ukraine’s largest film archive, discusses the Cen- ter’s mission in preserving the Ukrainian film legacy, particularly under conditions of wartime and unprecedented pressure from the Ukrainian State Film Agency, Derzhkino. Teliuk discusses the Center’s successes in recovering silent-era films that were deemed lost, restoring and digitizing archival reels, and reintroducing them to the public. He further highlights the unique materials preserved at the Dovzhenko Center, including the reels and documents from Kyivnaukfilm Studio, as well as the Center’s projects and exhibitions aimed at promoting Ukrainian film history, includ- ing the scholarly website on VUFKU films from the 1920s, a DVD set of Chornobyl documentaries, and others.

This interview was recorded in May 2023 by Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University, and annotated by Ana Hedberg Olenina.

Oleksandr Teliuk is a film scholar, film director, and Head of the Archive Department at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center, Ukraine. He was co-curator of film programs and exhibitions at the Film Museum of the Dovzhenko Center (VUFKU: Lost & Found (2019), To Cry! To Call! To Burn! (2020)); co-editor of the books Cinematographic Revision of Donbas (2017, 2018), Chornobyl (In)Visible (2017), Ukrainian Film Critic Anthology of the 1920s (4 vols., 2018–2022), published by the Dovzhenko Center; and curator of numerous film programs of Ukrainian archival cinema at international film festivals. He also was a co-founder of the art union “ruїns collective” (2017–2021). His films have been screened at international film festivals in Marseille, Oberhausen, Jihlava, and Glasgow

In this interview, cinematographer Yuri Neyman reminisces about his work at the Kyiv Dovzhenko Film Studios in the early 1970s, providing an insider commentary on the studio’s atmosphere and administrative hierarchy. Particularly revealing are Neyman’s memoirs about the key figures of the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema, as well as the workings of ideological censorship administered from Moscow.

This interview was recorded in March, 2022, translated and edited by Sasha Razor, University of California Santa Barbara, and annotated by Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University, and Sasha Razor, University of California Santa Barbara.

Yuri Neyman Yuri Neyman is a cinematographer, inventor, and film educator, based in Los Angeles. While studying camerawork at the All-Union State Institute of Cin- ematography (VGIK) in Moscow in the late 1960s, Neyman developed strong ties with the Ukrainian film industry in Kyiv, collaborating on his capstone film project, Circle (Krug [Russian], Kruh [Ukrainian], 1971–1972), with the director Mykhailo Illienko, at the time, a fellow VGIK student. Upon gradu- ating from VGIK, Neyman gained his first professional recognition for his camerawork on Mayakovsky Laughs (Maiakovskii smeetsia, dir. Sergei Iutke- vich, 1976). Immigrating to the United States in 1978, Neyman continued to work in cinema. His American debut as a director of photography was Liquid Sky (dir. Slava Tsukerman, 1982), a daring independent sci-fi film set in New York during the Punk era, which has had a profound influence on neo-noir visual aesthetics. Neyman’s substantial filmography as a director of photography includes D.O.A. (1988), Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald (1993), and Scattered Dreams (1993); he also directed a number of commercial projects, such as a music video for Chris Isaaks’s “Two Hearts” (1993). As an inventor, Neyman made significant contributions to the field by patenting a color correction and data management system for film and digital cinematography. He has taught at the American Film Institute, UCLA, and CUNY, and co-founded, with Vilmos Zsigmont, the Global Cinematography Institute in 2011.

This interview with award-winning documentary filmmaker Nadia Parfan explores the stylistic principles and themes in her film Heat Singers (Spivaie Ivano- frankivs'kteplokomunenerho) and recent shorts, including I Did Not Want to Make a War Film (2022). Parfan further discusses the mission of the streaming platform for Ukrainian films, TakFlix, as well as the irrevocable losses brought to Ukraine by the Russian invasion.

This interview was recorded on November 4, 2022 by Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University, and Kateryna Ruban, New York University, and annotated by Ana Hedberg Olenina.

Nadia Parfan is an award-winning Ukrainian director, producer, and curator based in Kyiv. She is an alumna of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the Cen- tral European University, where she pursued cultural studies and social anthropology. After spending a year in the US on a Fulbright Fellowship, she studied documentary filmmaking at the Andrzej Wajda Film School in Warsaw. Parfan’s film Heat Singers (Spivaie Ivano-frankivs'kteplokomunenerho, 2019) was voted the Best Documentary by the Ukrainian Film Academy and the Ukrainian Film Critics. She is the founding director of the streaming platform TakFlix, which features curated collections of contemporary and historical films from Ukraine. She is a co-founder of the international festival of cinema and urbanism “86,” as well as a producer of the documentary project MyStreetFilmsUkraine. Together with Illia Gladshtein, she runs the production company, Phalanstery Films.

In this interview, award-winning documentary filmmaker Oksana Karpovych reveals the creative principles behind her atmospheric film Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open, about commuter trains around Kyiv. She further discusses her experience as a war witness and her poignant new project, Intercepted, which combines the footage she recorded in war-torn territories of Ukraine with an audio track consisting of intercepted telephone conversations of Russian soldiers.

This interview was recorded November 18, 2022 and August 2, 2023 by Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University, and Kateryna Ruban, New York University, and annotated by Ana Hedberg Olenina.

Oksana Karpovych is a director, writer, and photographer born in Kyiv. Her documentary Intercepted (2024), with voices of the Russian occupying army soldiers laid over images of Ukraine’s devastation, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024. Her debut film Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open (2019) won the New Visions Award at the RIDM festival in Montreal and received an honorable mention at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. In her intimate documentaries, Karpovych explores everyday lives and collective traumas of the common people and the intrusion of state politics into the personal sphere. A graduate of Concordia University in Montreal, in 2019 she worked as a film mentor with the indigenous communities in Canada. Having relocated back to Ukraine in early 2022, she served as a local producer for international reporters covering Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in the spring of 2022. Her wartime travelog has been published in the German anthology Out of the Fog of the War: Ukraine’s Present (Aus dem Nebel des Krieges: Die Gegenwart der Ukraine).

In this interview, award-winning documentary filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski discusses his work on the films Landslide and Infinity According to Florian, as well as his in vestigative project Chornobyl 22 about the Russian takeover of the Chornobyl nuclear plant after the full-scale invasion. He further shares his perspective on the politics of Ukraine’s neoliberal economy, Russia’s war crimes, and pathways towards decolonizing the Russo-centric cultural canon.

This interview was ecorded on November 29, 2022 by Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University; with the participation of Kateryna Ruban, New York University; Vincent Bohlinger, Rhode Island College; and Masha Shpolberg, Bard College. The interview was annotated by Ana Hedberg Olenina.

Oleksiy Radynski is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. After studying film theory at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, he took part in collective film experiments including Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut) and Labor in a Single Shot by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann. Radynski’s films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, e-flux (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), DOK Leipzig, Krakow IFF, Sheffield Doc Fest, and Docudays (Kyiv). His latest film Chornobyl 22 won the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen International Film Festival in 2023. As an essayist, he has been a frequent contributor to the e-flux journal. His articles have appeared in critical anthologies on contemporary art, including Soviet Modernism 1955–1991: Unknown Stories (2012), Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics, and Society in Russia at the Turn of Decade (2013), Sweet Sixties: Spirits and Specters of a Parallel Avant-Garde (2014), Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (2017), Being Together Precedes Being (2018), and Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (2018).

This paper examines representations of Ukraine’s civil society and community building in artistic documentaries, released in the wake of the post-EuroMaidan national revival, before the full-scale Russian invasion. Drawing on interviews with filmmakers, the paper analyzes the themes and style of Nadia Parfan’s cine-symphony Heat Singers (2019) about an amateur folk choir at a municipal heating plant; Oksana Karpovych’s atmospheric ethnography of regional commuter trains in Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open (2019); and Oleksiy Radynski’s reflections on cultural spaces in Landslide (2016), a portrait of a bohemian art collective, and Infinity According to Florian (2022)—a film about the architecture of the Soviet space age threatened by realty developers. A running thread uniting these films is a quest for a communal public sphere, as well as a reckoning with the legacy of Soviet cultural institutions and material infrastructures. Sensitive to the inequalities and injustices of Ukraine’s neoliberal present, these films show what it means to have a community and to build horizontal relationships between generations and diverse social strata. In contextualizing these themes, the paper points to Ukraine’s efforts in rediscovering the forgotten and suppressed pages of the past and promoting the country’s rich cultural traditions.

Ana Hedberg Olenina is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Media Studies at Arizona State University. Her main research focus is the Soviet avant-garde, while her broader interests lie at the juncture of international cinema, history of psychology and media theory, with an emphasis on historical configurations of spectators’ experience and immersive environments. Her book Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Russian and American Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2020) was awarded the Wayne Vucinich Prize (ASEEES) and Best First Book (AATSEEL). Her essays on Modern dance, Soviet cinema, and applications of neuroscience in film studies have appeared in journals such as Discourse, Film History, Apparatus, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski and several anthologies.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has quickly become one of the most well-documented military conflicts. In part because so many believed the massing of Russian troops on the border to be nothing more than a provocation, when the full-scale invasion came, civilians quickly turned into amateur war reporters, filming the damage wrought by missiles and troops as if to prove that it was really happening. The country’s filmmakers were not far behind. This article briefly considers the documentary output coming out of the war as a whole before turning to six case studies of films that use the formal aspects of cinema as a medium—shot duration, framing, the juxtaposition of sound and image, as well as the structure that arises from editing—to make arguments about both the nature of this particular war and the experience of war as such. It begins by examining the work of two filmmakers’ collectives: Babylon’13 and Freefilmers. It contrasts these fragmentary or “mosaic” narratives of the war told from the Ukrainian side with two films made using “trophy footage”: Ukrainska Pravda’s The Occupant (2022), a compilation of the videos shot by a Russian soldier on his phone, and Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024), which layers phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families over images of destroyed Ukrainian cities. It concludes with a comparison of two siege films, produced at grave risk to the filmmakers’ lives: Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and Hana Bilobrova and the late Mantas Kveradavicius’ Mariupolis 2 (2022). Attending to both the films and their means of production, the article argues, has a lot to teach us about the way in which cinema can not only bear witness or constitute an archive but also actively contribute to the war effort.

Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. Her teaching and research explore global documentary, Central and Eastern European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. Together with Lukas Brasiskis, she is co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (2023) and with Anastasia Kostina— of The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies & Comparative Literature from Yale University.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in the voice of a Swiss citizen of mixed French, Aus- trian, and English descent with precious little awareness of anything Russian. Alien as they may be to the novel’s protagonist, Russian concerns are very much on the mind of its author. Using archival research, this study discloses one tangible way in which Lolita integrates Nabokov’s Russian cultural heritage by responding to Alek- sandr Blok through the mediation of John Keats. Blok’s poetry became a formative impression of Nabokov’s youth; his discovery of Keats left a lasting mark on his literary sensibility. It is well known that a Russian translator of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Nabokov infused Lolita with references to the ballad. The study unlocks a hitherto unknown subtext of these Keatsian references: their close association not only with Blok, but with Nabokov’s conflicted attitude toward Blok’s narrative poem The Twelve.

Stanislav Shvabrin is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to his editorial and scholarly work on Vladimir Nabokov, he has written on Georgy Ivanov, Andrei Kurbsky, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Marina Tsvetaeva, inter alia. Apart from SEEJ, his articles and reviews have appeared in Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, Comparative Literature, The Nabokovian, Nabokovskii vestnik, The Russian Review, Russian Literature, Slavic Review, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, and Zvezda.