Mascara Film Club presents a group screening that focuses on Russian imperialism within the broader scope of history. Maintained through turbo-capitalist expansion, Russia repeats a colonial logic of violence – evident from the tsarist era, through the Soviet Union and active up until today. The films included in this program engage with themes of annihilation and extraction, analysing Russia’s infrastructural control and erasure of indigenous, religious and cultural practices.

Where Russia Ends
Oleksiy Radynski, 2024, 25 min

Oleksiy Radynskis’s Where Russia Ends presents a montage of archival footage originally shot by Ukrainian filmmakers in the late 1980s from several film expeditions to remote parts of Siberia. Discovered in Kyiv Popular Science Film Studios (Kyivnaukfilm) in 2022, the work reconstructs an erased history of Russia’s imperialist wars waged against its subsequent colonies. The film essay focuses on settler-colonial practices of extraction of natural resources, environmental destruction and oppression of indigenous and racialized populations. The work addresses the need for a decolonial reading of Russian Soviet expansionism and its longstanding imperialist ambitions. Where Russia Ends concludes by listing the many native populations which were part of the Soviet Union – Altai, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Chechen-Ingushetia, Chuvasia, Kalmykia, Karelia, Komi, Mariy El, Northern Ossetia, Sakha-Yakutia, Tatarstan, Tuva, Udmurtia, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region – who declared their state sovereignty after the collapse of the Soviet Union only for it to be subsequently cancelled by the Russian Federation.

The Haunted
Saodat Ismailova, 2017, 22 min

Saodat Ismailova’s The Haunted is a cinematographic and meditative work that looks at the extinction of the Turanian tiger that once inhabited Central Asia. Up to today, this animal has been worshipped and respected as sacred by local populations of the northwestern region of Uzbekistan. Within the film, Ismailova interweaves archival footage with landscape shots, contemplating the loss and annihilation of this spiritual creature, as well as its associated religious and cultural beliefs. As one voice states in the video, “They've been killing you for a long time, I'm sorry I didn't save you. They stole our Paradise, they burned our garden”. The narration and evocative use of sound make this work a mystical rumination reinscribing the sacred tiger against practices of erasure that started during the tsarist era and continued throughout the Soviet period.

Earth
Oleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930, 76 min

Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth, often regarded as the masterpiece of the Soviet avant-garde cinema, is praised for its form, visual style and editing. The film portrays the everyday life of Ukrainian peasants amidst the backdrop of land collectivisation, also known as dekulakization, pursued by the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1933. This policy aimed to transform individual land and labour into collective farms in support of the working class. Although Dvozenko portrays a revolt of poorer peasants against a wealthy landowner this fictionalised narrative has been interpreted as propaganda in support of Ukrainian independence, leading to the film being banned only nine days after its release. The forceful implementation of the policy had a direct effect on the Holodomor – a man-made famine during the Stalinist rule – that led to starvation of up to five million Ukrainian peasants. This work captures the colonial concept of Ukraine as the “breadbasket of Europe”, whose territory contains a quarter of the world's most fertile soil chernozem (black earth). Practices of land dispossession and extractivism reverberate throughout the film evoking Russia’s present-day shelling of Ukrainian farmable land.

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Mascara Film Club is an artist-run film club. Taking place outside institutional art spaces, they screen artists’ moving image in more convivial contexts. Through their programming they seek to bring into conversation films and people, and foster a self-organised infrastructure for moving image practitioners. More info: https://mascarafilmclub.co.uk/