The Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CEREES) at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) is presenting a screening of the feature-length documentary Transformation (2026), with an introduction by Dr Anke Hennig.

Transformation

Directed by Ganka Tretiak

Produced by Artem Burba

BRB Production, Ukraine, Supported by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine

Transformation is a feature-length documentary that explores the inner metamorphosis of civilians who consciously chose to become soldiers in the context of Ukraine’s full-scale war. Musicians, visual artists, filmmakers and cultural practitioners left their civilian life to take up arms, and to give voice to the shared experience of life at war.

The film does not frame war as a military spectacle. Instead, it examines war as an inner path of profound psychological and existential transformation. At the centre of the narrative is DJ Topolsky, an electronic musician who joined the armed forces. On the front lines, his civic values did not get erased but transformed into a new form of resilience and inner strength. An important ethical dimension is introduced by Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2022, who-in the current context of failing international institutions-calls for a transformation of personal into global solidarity.

Dr. Anke Hennig is a theorist of 20th and 21st-century literature and visual culture. She lectures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She held Visiting Professorships at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the University of the Arts, Berlin. She is also the author of Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy (in German Vorwerk 8, 2010) and, in co-operation with Armen Avanessian — co-author of the trilogy on Speculative Poetics: Present Tense. A Poetics (Bloomsbury 2015), Metanoia. Speculative Ontology of Language (Bloomsbury 2017) and Speculative Poetics of Feminism, Algorithmics, Politics and Capital (in German Merve 2019). Most recently, she co-authored Salt and Sugar. M. Kalatozov’s Revolutionary Cinema(Apparatus 2025) together with Rachel Moore.