‘Ukrainian cinema of the 1990s: from free market to free fall’ with Stanislav Menzelevskyi | Kino 2026
Date and time:
Tuesday 7 April, 2026
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
While we celebrate the independence of Ukraine on 24 August 1991, the processes that brought it about began much earlier and continue to evolve today. Ukrainian cinema in the late 1980s to early 1990s was a contradictory phenomenon—a spontaneous cinematic response to one of the most dramatic and unsettled periods in the country’s history, marked by a collision of hope and despair, fleeting exhilaration followed by deep disillusionment. This era in film not only reflects the transformation of society driven by the advent of a free market, but also highlights the intense, ongoing struggle between personal freedom and institutional power. The films we will consider in this seminar address shifting ideas of sexuality, the consumerisation of society, the rise of a market economy, the reassessment of the totalitarian past, and the influx of mystical practices. As such, Ukrainian cinema became an arena where new symbolic systems were forged, aiming to represent a new physical and metaphysical reality in the post-Chornobyl era.
£35 general £25 student Friends and Benefactors of the Institute are also eligible for a discount.
Lecturer
Stanislav Menzelevskyi
Stanislav Menzelevskyi is a film scholar and archivist with a background in cultural studies. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and co-founded the Medusa independent publishing project. Stanislav headed the Research and Programming Department of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre for over a decade. During his time there, he researched silent and sound Soviet cinema, wrote articles on film and culture, and curated screenings and retrospectives, both in Ukraine and internationally. Co-author of Atomopolis. Assembling Utopia (2016) and Lviv-Intervision (2018) compilation films, he is currently pursuing a PhD at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington, after spending time as a Fulbright Fellow at UC Berkeley and a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute.
