‘Ukrainian poetic cinema: the flowering and the tragedy’ with Vitaly Chernetsky | Kino 2026
Date and time:
Tuesday 3 March, 2026
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
The seminar delves into the history of the rise and the tragic deliberate destruction by the Soviet state of a remarkable school of innovative filmmaking that arose in Ukraine in the early 1960s and came to be known as the Ukrainian poetic cinema. The films of Leonid Osyka, especially A Stone Cross (1968), his masterpiece, will form its core. Osyka’s approach to filmmaking is contrasted to that of his friend and mentor, Serhii Parajanov, to emphasise the internal diversity within Ukrainian poetic cinema. The rediscovery and rethinking of Ukrainian cinema of the 1960s in regional and global contexts will also be part of our focus.
£35 general £25 student Friends and Benefactors of the Institute are also eligible for a discount.
Lecturer
Vitaly Chernetsky
Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas and currently a URIS Fellow at the University of Basel. A native of Ukraine, he received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007), of five edited or co-edited volumes, and numerous articles on modern and contemporary Slavic and East European literatures and cultures where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is forthcoming. Prof Chernetsky is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies; and in 2024, he served as the President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). In December 2024, he was elected President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US.
