Future in the Past: Shorts
Future in the Past: Shorts
These shorts highlight damaged places, landscapes, and material remnants that bear the weight of imperial violence. The films invite the audience to reflect upon the lingering presence of imperial histories in the former Soviet Union. Q&A with Olena Newkryta and Gulzat Egemberdieva.
The curated selection of shorts offers an evocative exploration of images' potent forces in shaping our understanding of geography. The images of land reveal a damaged material environment as the most explicit witness of the suppressive past. The films invite the audience to reflect upon the lingering presence of imperial histories encouraging the invention of new pathways to confront their enduring impact.
By delving into the shared themes of memory, landscape, and the reverberations of the past, this curated selection offers a compelling and thought-provoking experience that deepens our understanding of the complex relationship between visual geography and collective memory.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers (Olena Newkryta and Gulzat Egemberdieva).
Programmers of the Future
Not a Map But a Trace: Former Soviet Land Reclaimed features films that follow alternative visual geographies of the former Soviet Union. By highlighting the damaged landscapes that preserve the historical memory of the oppression, these films reclaim them from the hegemonic narratives of state socialism. Ultimately, denouncing the dangers of the imperial imaginary, the program highlights the necessity for renewed modes of cross-border connection and communication.
First cohort
This summer, three Programmers of the Future present their first film programmes in Eye. They are part of the first cohort of a traineeship for future film programmers, set up by Eye in 2022.
Programme
Ostrannenie (Alex Anikina, GB/RU 2015, 8')
This video-exploration traces a history of imaginary lands from the times when the Earth rested on elephants’ backs to the current moment of Google Maps and glossy stock footage.
The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun (Anton Vidokle, KZ 2015, 34')
A science-fiction documentary that studies the visual disparity between the traditional steppe landscape and symbols of Socialist progress. It looks at the poetic dimension of solar cosmology of Soviet biophysicist, Alexander Chizhevsky. Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was imprisoned and later exiled, the film introduces Сhizhevsky’s research into the impact of solar emissions on human sociology, psychology, politics and economics in the form of wars, revolutions, epidemics and other upheavals.
A Swim (Salomé Jashi, GE 2012, 12')
An observational film of monochromatic settlements built in lines and rows. This settlement in Tserovani, which was built for those displaced after the war with Russia in 2008, is a visualization of the system – a social scheme – that exists in Georgia.
Moscow Time (Gulzat Egemberdieva, Chubak Egemberdiev, KG 2020, 12')
Anara is a nine-year-old girl, who lives with her two grandmothers in Engilchek (Enilchek), a former Soviet militarized “secret city” in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. The morning news of former Radio Moscow intrudes into their existence which is slowly returning to pastoral life. What are Anara’s perspectives? Join her mother as a migrant worker in Russia or grow up in desolate Engilchek?
Ruins in Reverse (Olena Newkryta, UA/AT 2020, 25')
Shot in the steppe-like landscape of southern Ukraine, the short film follows the transformation process of a vacant Soviet residential building, built according to a standardized Soviet master plan. The traces of private biographies and vestiges of past ideologies inscribed into the physical remnants, find their ways into new constructions. Considering on the one hand, the Soviet infrastructures and belief systems which continue to affect everyday life; on the other hand, the privatization processes at the beginning of the 90s, the film raises questions on how people navigate between the socialist and capitalist ruins.
Read Kseniia Bespalova's essay on the programme Not a Map But a Trace: Former Soviet Land Reclaimed in our online magazine.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2023
Length
126 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
Programmers of the Future 2023
This summer, three Programmers of the Future present their first film programmes in Eye Filmmuseum. Programmers Janilda Bartolomeu, Korée Wilrycx and Kseniia Bespalova are among the very first to take part in Eye’s talent development programme for future film programmers, set up in 2022. The programme will feature cinema from the African diaspora that counters the notion of a singular reality, female artists on masculinity and alternative visual geographies of the former Soviet Union.
Eye Film Player
The Programmers of the Future each present an additional programme on Eye Film Player. Every week from 7 July, new titles will be available to watch at home. The films selected by Kseniia Bespalova will be available from 7 July.
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