7:30 on Wednesday, February 21st
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
When Spring Came to Bucha
(2022, Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz, Ukraine, 64 min, in Ukrainian and Russian w/ English subtitles)
When Russia launched a missile attack on Bucha that day, a small town in the Kyiv region, Bucha, was devastated. After Russian troops withdrew from their town in March that year, Ukrainians emerged from their homes to clean their streets from debris, rebuild their shattered homes, and face a new day while grieving for loved ones who perished in the bombing. This film poignantly captures a small community trying to continue with life amid trauma and loss, while the war rages on. Yuri, municipal services manager, struggles to keep people supplied with clean drinking water. Young Olenka is the only student left in her classroom, as all her friends left Ukraine after two of their classmates were killed. Yet in the midst of suffering, a young couple gets married, and life must go on. This heart-wrenching yet inspiring documentary tells stories of grief, hope, and resistance, as another spring comes to Bucha and everything is in bloom.
Film Screening
Wednesday, February 21st
Free and open to the public
Co-Sponsored by:
Film Screening
Introduced by
Prof. Vitaly Chernetsky
(President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies)
Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor in the Department of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on modern and contemporary cultures (literature, film, popular culture) of Ukraine, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, considered in a broader comparative/cross-regional and interdisciplinary contexts. He has also been researching globalization and its cultural aspects, postmodernism/postmodernity, Modernism/modernity, postcolonial theory & writing, questions of identity & community, diasporic cultures, nationalism & ethnicity, and broader issues in literary & cultural theory, cultural studies, film studies, feminist theory, gender and queer studies, and translation studies.
Mariana Ivanova
Mariana Ivanova is Associate Professor for German Film and Media and Academic Director of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also the director of several documentaries about Eastern European filmmakers. Her scholarship focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German and European cinemas and cultures, theories of transnational filmmaking and coproduction, film adaptation, artistic networks, dissidence, and cultural mediation. Ivanova’s 2020 book, Cinema of Collaboration: DEFA Coproductions and International Exchange in Cold War Europe repositions the East German film industry within world cinema via the lenses of cultural prestige and film cooperation. She most recently co-edited the volume “Science on Screen and Paper: Media Cultures of Knowledge Production in Cold War Europe” (forthcoming in August 2024).