(Post-)Soviet cinema through a “decolonial lens”: theoretical framework and personal introspection

SPEAKERS: Heleen Gerritsen, Barbara Wurm, Nancy Condee

Kicking off the symposium, curators Heleen Gerritsen and Barbara Wurm introduce and contextualise their approach by speaking about the theoretical background and influential literature that informs their work, as well as the festival’s own history of curating and programming (post-)Soviet cinema. In her keynote, Nancy Condee reflects on the question of how applicable post-colonial theory is within the context of the post-Soviet space.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Heleen Gerritsen is the Director of goEast Film Festival, a founding member of the Documentary Association of Europe, and a member of the European Film Academy. Originally from the Netherlands, she has worked in a number of production and festival roles. From 2014 to 2016, she served as festival director for the European documentary film festival dokumentART in Neubrandenburg.

Barbara Wurm is a cultural researcher, author, curator, and film critic, originally from Vienna. Since 2011, she has been a research associate in the section for East Slavic Literatures and Cultures at Berlin’s Humboldt University. In addition, she programmes for a variety of film festivals, including the Berlinale, where she has been chosen to take over direction of the Forum section starting in August 2023. She has published widely on the topic of post-Soviet film, as well as on the work of filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

Nancy Condee is a film scholar and director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include cultural politics and Russian cinema. Her monograph The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema received several awards from the Society for Cinema & Media Studies and the Modern Language Association. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New Left Review and Iskusstvo Kino. She has also been active as a jury member at international film festivals including Kinotavr, Listopad, and Russian Film Week in London.