Recent Special Journal Issues on Ukrainian Cinema

Author

Clea Wanner

Abstract

This review essay examines four recent English-language special journal issues that mark a significant turn in Ukrainian film scholarship. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, vol. 15, no. 1, December 2023, eds. Mariia Lihus and Patricia Castello Branco; Studies in World Cinema, vol. 4, no. 2, September 2024; Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 68, no. 3, Fall 2024, ed. Ana Hedberg Olenina; and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, vol. 18, no. 3, November 2024, eds. Jeremy Hicks and Leonid Machulin. These volumes collectively challenge the long-standing Russocentric framing of Ukrainian cinema, offering correctives to historiographic gaps and foregrounding overlooked films, filmmakers, and institutions. They span a wide temporal range, from early Soviet era experimentation to post-Maidan documentary movements, and reflect diverse methodological approaches, including historical, philosophical, and political lenses. While these volumes are not a substitute for the long-absent, much-needed English language history of Ukrainian cinema, they do provide a vital foundation for its future development. By amplifying Ukrainian voices and encouraging transnational dialogue, they reframe the field and ignite new directions for research and teaching. This is a revised version of the review essay originally published on December 21, 2025, which covered three special issues but regrettably did not include the significant contribution to Ukrainian cinema studies made by the special issue of Studies in World Cinema. The present article adds a review of that issue, incorporates new visual material, and includes minor revisions to the original text.

Keywords

Ukraine cinema, post-colonialism, New Ukrainian Wave, poetic cinema, cinema and national identity, trauma and war in film, resilience and resistance in film.

Scholarly interest in Ukrainian cinema – both its history and its recent developments – has grown considerably since the Euromaidan, the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine in 2014, and especially following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. This shift has been long overdue in non-Ukrainian academic contexts, a view seemingly shared by all contributors to the journal issues discussed below. One particularly telling indicator, frequently noted across the contributions, is the continued absence of an English-language history of Ukrainian cinema, which can be explained in part by the dominant Russocentric historiography of Soviet film, but not justifiable more than thirty years after the USSR’s collapse and in light of Ukrainian cinema’s long-standing international relevance, which dates back more than a hundred years.

The four volumes under review are among the most substantial contributions to Ukrainian film scholarship published in English over the past two years. That all four appeared within less than a year signals an intensified engagement with Ukrainian cinema across institutions and disciplines, and deserves special attention. Needless to say, many other English-language research projects and publications continue to shape the field and cannot, unfortunately, be addressed within the scope of this review. The issues discussed here were preceded by numerous symposia, conferences, screenings, and public discussions on Ukrainian cinema, in which these editors and contributors were often actively involved. Together, the volumes offer not only a corrective to existing knowledge gaps regarding overlooked films, filmmakers, and institutions but also experiment with different methodological frameworks and approaches to film history. While their shared goal is to raise the visibility of Ukrainian cinema and free it from colonial labels such as ‘’provincial’ or ‘’secondary’’. This aim also requires engaging with the academic structures and hierarchies that shape our view of Ukrainian culture – a challenge each issue addresses to varying degrees.

The special issue of Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema is a collaboration with the Ukrainian-language journal Kul’tura Ukrainy, published in parallel in English and Ukrainian. Unlike the other three issues discussed in this review, this volume focuses primarily on the history of Ukrainian cinema, including contemporary films that engage with both the older and more recent past. The editors, Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) and Leonid Machulin (Kharkiv State Academy of Culture), state in their introduction that their aim is not only to advance scholarly engagement with Ukrainian film but also to actively support Ukrainian film studies, regardless of whether scholars are based inside or outside Ukraine. Accordingly, four of the six articles are authored by Ukrainian scholars. This kind of collaboration, which acknowledges power asymmetries in academic knowledge production, is welcome, yet still rare in the Western, largely Anglophone fields of Film and Slavic Studies. Despite recent calls for decolonisation, especially since February 2022, few projects have seriously reflected on how deeply the dominance of English and the centrality of Western institutions continue to shape global research infrastructures.

The editors frame the issue around “the debate as to what is a Ukrainian film and on what basis can a film be defined as Ukrainian, and which Soviet-era films should be included in Ukrainian cinema and a history of it?” (Hicks and Machulin 2024: 257). Interestingly, however, these guiding questions are addressed most directly by the two non-Ukrainian contributors (Vincent Bohlinger and Hicks), while the other articles touch on these questions only indirectly, a division of focus that is perhaps not entirely accidental. In their introduction, the editors provide a helpful overview of Ukrainian film history and state of scholarship, and outline two possible frameworks for defining Ukrainian cinema: an exclusive and an inclusive one. The former, motivated by the desire to move beyond Russian-imperial dominance, seeks to foreground a “distinctly Ukrainian cinema, made by Ukrainians, employing the Ukrainian language and relating to Ukrainian culture” (ibid.: 257). The latter, ultimately adopted in the issue, focuses on films produced in Ukraine regardless of language, ethnicity, or thematic orientation. While this typology is useful, a clearer critical stance would have been welcome, especially regarding the rationale for the inclusive approach and the troubling implications of adopting an exclusionary, ethnonationalist framework.

The six articles are divided into three sections, each focusing on a different period from the past century of Ukrainian cinema. Notably, the Thaw era is omitted – deliberately, given the already extensive scholarship – while the underexplored period of the 1930s and 1940s under Stalin is included instead. The 1920s marked a phase of relative artistic freedom shaped by the Soviet Ukrainization policy, which aimed to integrate the Ukrainian population into the Soviet state while suppressing national autonomy movements. While I initially expected these articles to revisit familiar interpretations, the two contributions of this decade proved particularly insightful and will be given more attention here. Oleksandr Dovzhenko, and especially his film Zemlia / Earth (1930, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), is widely seen as emblematic of this cultural flowering. His work has been extensively studied, though not exhaustively. The tendency to associate national cinemas with a small number of canonical auteurs is common, despite its predictable distortions. Vincent Bohlinger responds to this in his article by analysing the montage techniques of Mykola Shpykovskyi, a lesser-known director, in order to identify stylistic features of Ukrainian cinema in the late VUFKU period. His approach draws on Jinhee Choi’s (2006) relational concept of national cinema, which defines cinematic traditions not by origin or theme, but as context-dependent configurations shaped in contrast to other styles and production systems.

Given my interest in early film theory, I found Stanislav Menzelevskyi’s article on the journal Kino (1925–1933) particularly engaging. His provocative opening claim that a Ukrainian cinemagoer in the 1920s might well have imagined cinema without Dovzhenko or Dziga Vertov, but not without Kino, highlights how later views can distort early film realities (Fig.1). While Soviet film theory of the 1920s is typically understood through Russian texts developed within the immediate orbit of Moscow and Leningrad, Menzelevskyi shifts the focus to an understudied Ukrainian source. He shows how Kino not only responded to ideas from key figures like Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Vertov, but also developed its own lines of interpretation. One central thread that emerges is the effort to cultivate “cinema literacy” – that is, to shape a specifically Ukrainian vocabulary for thinking about film, a task Menzelevskyi suggests remains unfinished (see Larysa Naumova 2025). The journal’s closure in 1933 marked the onset of what he describes as an “intellectual coma” (Hicks and Machulin 2024: 275) in Ukrainian film criticism.

How to study a period labelled ‘dead’ or in an ‘intellectual coma’? The second section of the issue takes up this question, beginning with Oleksandr Bezruchko’s exploration of Dovzhenko’s pedagogical work in the late 1930s. Using lesser-known sources such as memoirs and rare periodical publications, he shows how cultural work persisted despite repression and constant threat. Co-editor Jeremy Hicks explores the boundaries of what constitutes Ukrainian national cinema through Raiduha / The Rainbow (1943, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), directed by Mark Donskoi and based on a novel by Polish author Wanda Wasilewska. Produced in Central Asia, where Kyiv’s film studios had been evacuated during the war, the film complicates straightforward national categorisation.

The final section turns to how film represents key moments in Ukrainian history, a thematic shift that sits somewhat loosely within the issue’s overall focus on the Soviet-era development of Ukrainian cinema. Still, the articles offer productive perspectives: Nataliia Cherkasova analyses Agnieszka Holland’s Mr. Jones (2019, Poland, United Kingdom, Ukraine), a politically charged thriller centred on the Holodomor, while Lora Maslenitsyna explores Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan (2014, Ukraine, Netherlands) and his use of panoramic visual strategies, rooted in the 19th-century’s most populous optical device, the panorama, to question how history is constructed through film.

The second issue under review is from Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, published by the Nova Institute of Philosophy (Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon). Titled “Thinking Ukrainian Cinema”, the issue, edited by Mariia Lihus and Patrícia Castello Branco, approaches the subject through an aesthetic and philosophical lens, in line with the journal’s broader commitment to the philosophical investigation of cinema. Although not explicitly framed as such, the issue grew out of a conference held in July 2023 at the Nova Institute of Philosophy, in which all contributing authors participated. The resulting collection, assembled within just six months, places particular emphasis – three of the six articles – on contemporary Ukrainian cinema, while also engaging with Ukrainian poetic cinema and the work of Kira Muratova.

The issue’s central themes revolve around the cultural and cinematic (re)construction of Ukrainian identity and cinema in the context of resistance during times of war and political repression. In line with this, co-editors Lihus and Castello Branco discuss the significance of cinema as both artistic expression and political intervention, highlighting the resilience and cultural significance of Ukrainian film. Such an approach is convincing and draws attention to cinema’s potential to be both socially reflective and socially formative. However, perhaps shaped by this committed stance, a few analytically reductive formulations appear – reinforcing a resilience-centred narrative while limiting attention to ruptures, institutional weaknesses, or periods of stagnation in the (Soviet-)Ukrainian film history.

At first glance, the selection of articles may appear somewhat heterogeneous; yet on closer reading, compelling lines of connection emerge across different contexts and historical periods. The strong emphasis in the introduction on cinema’s potential as a site of political engagement and a co-creator of social and political identities is taken up in the opening article. Elżbieta Olzacka analyses Ukrainian cinema of the post-2014 period, particularly in the context of the Russian war of aggression, from a cultural-sociological and film-economic perspective, analysing its capacity for social mobilisation. Her contribution sets a relevant framework for the following articles by Natascha Drubek and Oleksandra Kalinichenko, both of which explore cinema at the intersection of trauma and (self-)empowerment – whether individual or collective.

Kalinichenko draws on an extensively explored insight from memory studies that cinema is “a powerful tool for commemorative practice and creating a space for living with cultural trauma” (Lihus and Castello Branco 2023: 117). While her engagement with individual films remains relatively cursory, she offers a helpful thematic mapping of contemporary Ukrainian cinema through the lens of cultural trauma. Particularly valuable is her decision not to limit the analysis to the auteur cinema often favoured in scholarship, but to also include genre films – such as the historical blockbuster Povodyr / The Guide (Oles Sanin, 2014, Ukraine).

As Kalinichenko notes, post-traumatic stress disorders feature prominently in many Ukrainian films, and this is also reflected in Natascha Drubek’s analysis of Bachennya Metelyka / Butterfly Vision (2022, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Croatia, Sweden). Her focus lies on the representation of the female body, particularly the recurring image of the shorn head, which she situates within an intertextual network of visual motifs drawn from film, art, and photography. In doing so, she places the protagonist within a longer lineage of feminist resistance against the shaming of women’s bodies. While the essay foregrounds the historical development of the film’s symbolic language, a further step could involve situating this analysis more explicitly within current debates on the cinematic representation of sexualised violence in wartime.

Irina Schulzki contributes another visually and intertextually rich article. Set against the symbolic backdrop of Odesa as a space of ambivalence, hybridity, and multicultural entanglement, her article explores the possibility of a fluid model of canon formation, which is closely linked to the ongoing debate – examined in detail in the previous reviewed issue – on the construction of a Ukrainian national cinema. Schulzki analyses the work of Kira Muratova alongside that of her younger colleague Eva Neyman, not in terms of direct influence but rather through aesthetic resonances – gestures, gazes, rhythms. Through a formally and theoretically dense perspective, complemented by carefully curated references and links to video materials (Fig. 2), Schulzki demonstrates how this “process of cine-poetic heredity […] creates lines of continuity and contributes to the ongoing formation and reconfiguration of the contemporary Ukrainian cinematic canon in all its intercultural diversity and complexity” (ibid.: 74). Complementing Schulzki’s text, Edgaras Bolšakovas offers in his article a philosophically grounded reading of Kira Muratova’s melodramas, providing a further angle on her complex and multifaceted body of work.

Closing this part of the discussion is the article by Mariia and Olha Lihus that explores the music of Ukrainian poetic cinema and its role in constructing national identity. Approaching music as a means of performing collective representations, they focus not only on the use of traditional folk melodies but also on the interplay of musical idioms such as neo-folklorism and avant-garde musique concrète. Their analysis adds an important perspective to the acoustic-discursive dimension of poetic cinema that draws much of its character from a largely underexplored sound polyphony: “Silence, nature sounds, human voice, dialect speech, Ukrainian musical instruments, the performance of folklore, and the instrumental music of Ukrainian composers collectively form the sound world of Ukrainian poetic cinema” (ibid.: 33).

A last remark concerns the presentation of the online issue. Some layout inconsistencies, irregular formatting (especially of film titles), and less-than-optimal image rendering slightly compromise readability, particularly in visually grounded analyses. These aspects underline the urgent need for increased funding and infrastructural support for open access in the humanities, given the structural challenges faced by smaller OA journals. Unlike commercial publishers with dedicated production staff, such journals must rely on limited resources and platforms such as OJS, which provide dissemination but no professional typesetting solutions.

The Ukrainian special issue of the Slavic and East European Journal presents itself as a forum and, as the title “Ukrainian Cinema: An Invitation to Historians and Cinephiles” suggests, explicitly calls for continued dialogue. The issue is structured around two main lines of inquiry: the historical legacy of Ukrainian cinema and its historiographic framing, and the development of post-Maidan cinema from 2014 to the present. Interview-based formats on contemporary Ukrainian cinema have appeared elsewhere – for example, in the Kinokultura clusters of 2022 (Blackledge; Bohlinger; First; and Ladygina) and 2023 (Bohlinger and Ladygina), which combined interviews and film reviews. What distinguishes this SEEJ issue, however, is the way the authors enrich the conversations with extensive contextual framing and literary references, thereby embedding them in a format that is productive for future research.

What needs to be done to liberate Ukrainian film history from its Russocentric interpretive framework? This question runs like a thread through the three interviews that make up the issue’s opening section. The insights offered by the interviewees are remarkably clear-sighted and thought-provoking, providing precisely the kind of perspective that can reorient how we approach Eastern European cinema in research and teaching. Dina Iordanova, a leading scholar in Eastern European film studies, speaks of the imposed provincialism of Ukrainian-Soviet cinema. Focusing on Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s and 70s and drawing on the history of film festivals, she shows how working at the margins of Russian imperial structures has had lasting consequences for filmmakers and their work. “Not all roads lead to Tarkovsky” (Hedberg Olenina 2024: 294), she notes – a wry remark that captures the problem of treating Russian-language Soviet films produced in Moscow or Leningrad as the sole point of reference for Ukrainian Cinema or that of other former Soviet Republics. Her contribution makes a strong case for arguing that a transnational, comparative framework might yield new and different insights.

The two interviews that follow support Iordanova’s arguments. Cinematographer Yurii Neyman, who studied at VGIK in Moscow in the 1960s and emigrated to the U.S. in 1978, reflects on his early career, which is closely tied to director Mykhailo Illienko, the younger brother of the better-known Yurii Illienko, and to the Ukrainian film industry in Kyiv. This interview in particular shows the value of the authors’ careful annotations, which ground Neyman’s personal memories in historical research, resulting in a rich record of names, sources, and context related to Ukrainian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The final interview in this section features Oleksandr Teliuk, formerly head of the archival department at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre. His reflections link the section’s historical scope to the present and foreground the urgent role of archives in wartime and under conditions of domestic political pressure.

The second set of interviews features three directors from a younger generation, all graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Nadia Parfan, Oksana Karpovych, and Oleksiy Radynski belong to a generation shaped by the post-Soviet 1990s and politically awakened during the Orange Revolution of 2004 (Fig. 3). Their filmmaking has played a key role in what has come to be known as the New Ukrainian Wave, a movement that emerged in the wake of the 2014 Euromaidan. Editor and author Ana Hedberg Olenina draws together the interviews’ reflections on artistic practice, research methods, and self-understanding within the broader context of social engagement in a scholarly essay. In addition to detailed film analyses, she offers a pointed overview of societal developments since 2014 through the lens of engaged citizenship. For the filmmakers, nation-building is community building, an effort to “maintain horizontal relationships between generations and diverse social strata” (ibid.: 373). Hedberg Olenina convincingly shows how the films not only document this process but also become an active part of it.

Masha Shpolberg’s article concludes the special issue. While not directly connected to the interviews, it continues the discussion of how film can serve as a tool of democratic engagement. “It has become commonplace to say that smartphone cameras are turning every citizen into a war reporter” (ibid.: 391). In the context of recent digital and technological transformations, Shpolberg examines the political and aesthetic configurations of the many documentary films, movements, and collectives that have emerged in Ukraine since 2014. Her contribution stands in productive resonance with Yuliya Ladygina’s article, published earlier and discussed later in this review. Both examine how filmmakers engage with the transformations brought about by hybrid warfare, albeit in different cinematic contexts.

The final special issue under review is published in Studies in World Cinema with the active participation of Dina Iordanova. Her aim to restore Ukrainian cinema to its rightful place among national cinemas is pursued not only through scholarly essays but also through practical guidance, something often missing from academic publications unless explicitly conceived as handbooks. She offers in her introduction concrete suggestions for integrating Ukrainian films into existing curricula across different disciplines, and supplements the volume with a systematic compilation of English-language resources on Ukrainian cinema, presented as a separate contribution. This includes film databases, streaming platforms, and relevant scholarship published up to 2024. The extensive bibliography is curated in relation to the Top 100 list of Ukrainian films compiled by the Dovzhenko Centre. Fortunately, both of her contributions are available in open access, in contrast to the other articles in the issue.

The list itself indeed serves as an effective point of entry: carefully curated and presented online with background information and rich visual material, it offers both orientation and access to further materials (Fig. 4). The entry for the top-ranked film — Sergei Parajanov’s Tini zabutykh predkiv / Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) — even includes a scan of the film’s editing lists. Rather than providing a conventional editorial introduction, Iordanova structures her introductory contribution around this ranking. As in the volume edited by Hicks and Machulin, she outlines key developments in Ukrainian film history, but does so through selected films from the list, situating them within their respective socio-political and cultural contexts. She frequently draws on her own viewing experience, making her introduction both analytical and personal.