CEREES Discussion & Book Launch
Monday 2 December, 18:00-20:00
‘Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen’
Venue: Montagu Lecture Theatre, Graduate Centre (GC601), Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road London E1 4NS
Book here: Eventbrite
About the Panel:
About the Speakers:
Assiya Issemberdiyeva is a PhD student at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, University of London. She studied Journalism at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (BA, MA) and Film Studies at the Queen Mary University of London (MA). In 2021 she obtained a Collaborative Doctoral Award in Visual Cultures funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership with a thesis on British attitudes to the representation of Soviet Non-Slavic identities. Her project looks at the representation of Central Asian narratives in wartime Soviet cinema and the structure within which it was produced, analysing its reception both in the USSR and in Great Britain. The working title of her thesis is British Attitudes to Non-Russian Identities in World War Two Campaigns for British Aid to the Soviet Union.
Anisa Sabiri is a filmmaker and teacher based at the University of Central Asia in Naryn. Her work focuses on concepts of identity and memory, and the search for an indigenous Central Asian language in cinema. For several years, she worked as a tour guide in the Pamir mountains while building her profile as an avant-garde novelist, photographer and activist, before making her shorts Nolai Tanbur / The Crying of Tanbur (2018) and Az Alla To Vobalam / Rhythms of Lost Time (2021), featured at the Busan International Film Festival, Dokumenta-15, BOZAR, Asian Film Archive and other platforms and festivals worldwide. Sabiri is also an active promoter of the horizontal-based network in Central Asian art and education. She has been guest lecturing and running workshops for filmmakers with the University of Central Asia, Open Society, Internews, the Institute for War and Peace, and was a speaker at international platforms and events associated with European Film Market, UNESCO, TED Mastercard, Basel Peace Forum. Her film projects in development were featured at Berlinale, Ji.hlava International Film Festival, Sheffield IFF, CineDoc Tbilisi, and goEast East-West Talent Lab, among others. She holds an MA in Screenwriting from the London Film School with the support of the UK-government CHEVENING Scholarship, from which she graduated with the Outstanding Screenwriting Award in 2021. She is an alumna of the Busan Asian Film Academy, EFM Doc Toolbox-23, and the Sheffield Future Producers School. She is a member of Directors UK and the Documentary Association of Europe.
Serian Carlyle‘s research investigates the use of genre in films for young people made at the Gor’kii Central Film Studio under the Brezhnev leadership in the Soviet Union (1963-1982). Her work develops a historic understanding of the studio’s aims, function, and development in this period. To this end, she analyses the extent to which the studio’s internal directives shifted from the end of the Thaw to the early 1980s, in the context of wider changes to Soviet cinema, such as an increasing focus on ensuring profitability. She explores the different genres of films for young people that were made at the studio, focusing on four of the most prolific, namely: the fairy-tale, the adventure film, the school tale, and the war film.
Dusan Radunovic is Associate Professor/Director of Studies (Russian) in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, where he teaches Russian social and cultural history and film studies. He is the author of a monographs on the genesis of the concept of form in the twentieth-century Russian humanities (forthcoming) and on Mikhail Bakhtin (in Serbo-Croat, 2012) and co-editor of the volume Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (Routledge, 2012). His monograph on the concept of form in twentieth- century Russian humanities is being prepared for publication.
Natascha Drubek-Meyer is a researcher, author and editor in the area of Central and East European literature, film and media. Since 2012 Drubek has been teaching comparative literature, and film and media studies, at the Free University of Berlin (in 2020-21 as professor of the FONTE-Stiftung]. Drubek is one of the developers of Hyperkino and the editor-in-chief of the open-access academic journal Apparatus.
Irina Schulzski is Publishing Director @Apparatus Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe
Event outline:
Welcome, by Andy Willimott & Jeremy Hicks (QMUL) – 18:00
Panel Discussion – 18:05
Discussion, chaired by Natalya Chernyshova (QMUL) – 18:50
Drinks reception, meet the speaker – 19:10
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