Old and new wars: (post-)soviet (anti-)imperialism

SPEAKERS: Giedrius Tamoševičius, Nana Janelidze
MODERATOR: Barbara Wurm and Oksana Sarkisova

Nana Janelidze, director of Liza, Go On!, a drama about the Georgian-Abkhaz War that received its world premiere at goEast, and Giedrius Tamoševičius, director of The Poet, a film dealing with the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, discuss Russian and Soviet imperialism and depictions of war in Eastern European cinema with Barbara Wurm and Oksana Sarkisova.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Giedrius Tamoševičius is a Lithuanian writer and director. His feature debut as director, co-written with Vytautas V. Landsbergis, is The Poet, about the Lithuanian writer Kostas Kubilinskas and his secret connections to the KGB. The film won the Best Film Award in the Baltic Film Competition at Tallinn Black Nights in 2022..

Nana Janelidze is a Georgian screenwriter, author, and film and theatre director. Her screenplay for Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance received multiple honours, and the film went on to win the Special Jury Award at Cannes in 1987, as well as the Nika Award from the Russian Film Academy – a prize also awarded to her film Will There Be a Theatre Up There?!. In addition, she has been honoured with numerous awards for her work at international film festivals. She is the author of two books: Tengiz Abuladze: Reflections and Rezo Chkheidze: On the High Road of Film. From 2013 to 2016, she served as director of the Georgian National Film Center.

ABOUT THE MODERATORS:

Oksana Sarkisova is a research associate at the Blinken OSA Archivum of the Central European University in New York, where she also co-founded the Visual Studies Platform, as well as director of Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest. Her research interests include contemporary Eastern European cinema, cultural history, remembrance politics, and amateur photography. Her monograph Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia was published in 2017. In addition, she has been a member of juries at a wide range of film festivals, including in Nuremberg, Kyiv, Zagreb, Warsaw, and Tbilisi.

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.