The New Russian Documentary

Over the last three decades, Russian filmmakers and audiences have engaged with documentary cinema with an intensity unseen since the 1920s, when Soviet documentarians helped pioneer the mode. What started as a trickle of artistically minded films in the 1990s, expanded in the 2000s to include a broad range of works, chief among them films seeking to re-evaluate the country's past and take stock of its present. This efflorescence went hand in hand with the creation of new institutions film schools, festivals, and online platforms. The rise of YouTube, in particular, helped propel documentary into the cultural mainstream. Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the Kremlin's subsequent crackdown on independent media put an end to all this. The New Russian Documentary thus seeks to introduce readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices involved in this vibrant, if ultimately doomed, oppositionary movement.

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. In addition to this project, she is also co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe. Her academic articles have appeared in The Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She has also contributed film criticism Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is currently at work on a monograph titled Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest, which explores how filmmakers responded to successive waves of strikes by co-opting, confronting, or otherwise challenging the representational legacy of socialist realism. Anastasia Kostina is a post-doctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her current book project, The Mother of Soviet Documentary: Esfir Shub Between Theory and Practice, explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics and gender during the nascent stage of documentary cinema. The work aims to highlight the career of Esfir Shub, the first female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Dr. Kostina's writings on film and media have been featured in such publications as Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura and Apparatus.