The screening is followed by a statement by the artist and activist Marya Dmitrieva, presented by Mikhail Lylov.

Each film in the programme addresses a different fragment of life, a different space, where violence and the ways of dealing with its consequences reverberate. These spaces can be domestic and public, a shared history and a personal memory, mental spaces and landscapes. Authors highlight issues of the society that, on the one hand, had an open war zone on the eastern side, and on the other, has been reworking the positions towards its history and political alignments.

Letter to a Turtledove
Dana Kavelina, Ukraine 2020, 20 min. Russian OV with English subtitles

Letter to a Turtledove is an artistic reworking of found footage shot during the war in the Donbas region of the Ukraine. By intercutting this material with her own animated segments, staged mise-en-scènes, and archival images, Kavelina creates a feminist anti-war film poem.

So They Won't Say We Don't Remember
Yarema Malashchuk/Roman Himey, Ukraine 2020, 24 min. without dialogue

This video work is about both the hidden and the visible elements of the post-industrial landscape of the Donbas. In the film, locals and artists traverse the surface, following one of the underground routes of the Novator mine.

In Memory of Antonina Nikolayevna on Lost Love
Oleksandr Steshenko/Kateryna Libkind/Roman Himey/Yarema Malashchuk/Pavlo Yurov, Ukraine 2020, 30 min. Russian OV with English subtitles

In Memory of Antonina Nikolayevna on Lost Love is based on a screenplay by Oleksandr Steshenko - a person with down syndrome and a great admirer of the soap opera genre. The film uses the technique of alienation to tell a passionate love drama that escalates into revenge and domestic violence due to the conventions of a “normal” society.

NO!NO!NO!
Mykola Ridnyi, Ukraine 2017, 22 min. Russian OV with English subtitles

The main protagonists of the film are young people from Kharkiv, a city located in the Eastern part of the Ukraine. Their early twenties coincided with the breakout of the war in the neighboring region of Donbas. The proximity to the war has an effect on each of the characters and their activities. The protagonists react and reflect the political events through their specific relationships with the urban space and the reality of social media.

Marya Dmitrieva is a media artist and activist from St. Petersburg. She is a co-organizer of the queer anarcho-feminist group Studio 4413 which deals with the translation of contemporary critical theory into the language of everyday practices.

Letter to a Turtledove + So They Won't Say + In Memory of Antonina Nikolayevna + NO!NO!NO!