Mapping War, Memory, and Mediation:

The Ukraine New Cinema Symposium at Yale (March 27–29, 2026)

Author

Yuliya V. Ladygina

Abstract

This review examines the Ukraine New Cinema Symposium, held at Yale University from March 27-29, 2026, a hybrid film festival and academic conference co-sponsored by Yale, the Kempf Memorial Fund, Pennsylvania State University, and Razom for Ukraine. Bringing together scholars, filmmakers, and students, the event positioned Ukrainian cinema as central to current debates in film and media studies, particularly around war, post-Soviet transformation, and global circulation.

Keywords

Ukraine New Cinema Symposium, Ukrainian cinema, Ukrainian animation, The Sentimental Policeman (Kira Muratova, 1992), Atlantis (Valentyn Vasyanovych, 2019), Coal Cinema: Reclaiming Ukraine’s Donbas, Rule of Two Walls (David Gutnik, 2023), Chornobyl 22 (Oleksiy Radynski, 2023), Mokosh (Anna Dudko, 2023), My Closet (Iuliia Kotsiuba, 2023), Mariupol. A Hundred Nights (Sofiia Melnyk, 2023), Kyiv Cake (Mykyta Lyskov, 2025).

The Ukraine New Cinema Symposium, held at Yale University from March 27 to 29, 2026, offered a timely and conceptually rigorous intervention into the study of contemporary Ukrainian cinema. Conceived as a hybrid event that combined a film festival with an academic conference, it brought together scholars, students, and audiences to examine how Ukrainian film engages with war, post-Soviet transformation, and global cultural circulation. In doing so, the symposium contributed to an expanding body of scholarship that positions Ukrainian cinema at the centre of current debates in film and media studies. The symposium was co-sponsored by Yale University with the support of the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, The Pennsylvania State University, and Razom for Ukraine, reflecting the collaborative framework that shaped the event. 

The program juxtaposed historical and contemporary works in order to foreground both continuity and rupture within Ukrainian cinematic traditions. The opening screening of Kira Muratova’s Chutlyvyi militsioner / The Sentimental Policeman (1992, Ukraine), introduced by Nancy Condee (University of Pittsburgh), set a high intellectual bar. A leading figure in Soviet and post-Soviet film studies, Condee challenged reductive Cold War interpretive frameworks and argued that Muratova’s cinema interrogates civilisation itself rather than merely Soviet repression. Her reframing, aligned with the critical thought of Walter Benjamin and Zygmunt Bauman, shifted attention away from Soviet exceptionalism toward the broader contradictions of modernity.

If Muratova’s film established the symposium’s theoretical stakes, the screening of Valentyn Vasianovych’s Atlantyda / Atlantis (2019, Ukraine) provided its emotional and intellectual centre. The film imagines a near-future Donbas marked by ecological devastation and psychological trauma. Its austere formal language, composed of static long takes and a sparse soundscape dominated by industrial noise, underscores the fragility of human presence in a postwar environment. The discussion that followed, led by Yuliya V. Ladygina (The Pennsylvania State University), was among the most engaging moments of the symposium. Audience members focused on the film’s pacing, its refusal of narrative closure, and its restrained articulation of hope. Particular attention was given to the closing movement, where natural sound gradually replaces industrial noise, suggesting not resolution but the possibility of renewal. As emphasised in the discussion, Atlantis resists both propagandistic interpretation and redemptive narrative, offering instead a quiet, ethically grounded vision of postwar existence.

If the screenings foregrounded aesthetic responses to war and its aftermath, the faculty panel provided a sustained analytical framework for understanding these cinematic strategies. It opened with Nancy Condee and Stanislav Menzelevskyi’s introduction to the forthcoming volume Coal Cinema: Reclaiming Ukraine’s Donbas, a translation and expansion of a project originally developed in Ukraine between 2015 and 2017 in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of the region. Bringing together fourteen chapters and extensive filmographic materials, the volume traces representations of the Donbas across different historical periods while addressing broader questions of regional identity, memory, and colonial violence. Equally significant was its collaborative structure. Produced under wartime conditions, it draws on contributors working across four institutions in the United States and Ukraine, including the University of Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania State University, the College of William and Mary, and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Its development depended on sustained coordination among these teams, as well as on the contributions of graduate students engaged in translation, editorial work, and scholarly annotation.

Subsequent presentations extended these concerns into questions of mediation, trauma, and form. Yuliya V. Ladygina examined Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbas (2018, Ukraine), focusing on the film’s position between documentary reference and fictional construction and its interrogation of evidentiary truth in a media environment shaped by digital circulation and hybrid warfare. Olha Tytarenko shifted the focus to trauma, exploring how contemporary Ukrainian war cinema negotiates the tension between witnessing and aestheticisation. Her analysis emphasised trauma not only as a thematic concern but also as a structuring principle that shapes narrative form, spectatorship, and ethical engagement. Olga Blackledge’s presentation on Ukrainian animation concluded the panel by broadening the discussion beyond live-action film. By outlining key domains of production and analysing recent works, she demonstrated how animation functions both as an industrial practice and as a medium for processing wartime experience. Taken together, the panel moved from collaborative historiography to questions of mediation, trauma, memory, and cinematic form, offering a coherent account of the field’s current directions. At the same time, the strong emphasis on wartime production occasionally limited discussion of longer-term industrial and aesthetic developments within Ukrainian cinema.

The short film program and the closing screening of David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls (2023, Ukraine) extended these discussions into documentary and experimental practice. The program brought together works that approached war through both direct documentation and more affective, mediated strategies, including Oleksiy Radynski’s Chornobyl 22 (2023, Ukraine) and several animated shorts: Anna Dudko’s Mokosh (2023, Ukraine), Iuliia Kotsiuba’s Moia shafa / My Closet (2023, Ukraine), Sofiia Melnyk’s Mariupol. Sto nochei / Mariupol. A Hundred Nights (2023, Ukraine), and Mykyta Lyskov’s Kyivs’kyi tort / Kyiv Cake (2025, Ukraine). Across these films, cinema functioned not only as a means of recording events but also as a mode of shaping their meaning, operating simultaneously as archive and interpretation. This trajectory culminated in Gutnik’s film, which foregrounds artistic responses to wartime conditions and the role of cultural production as both witness and intervention. The discussion that followed was particularly vibrant and sustained. Co-moderated by Andrei Kureichik, an oppositional Belarusian playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director, the exchange gained a distinct transnational dimension and sharpened critical focus. As both filmmaker and co-organiser of the symposium, Gutnik was an active participant throughout the event, and his engagement in the Q&A created a direct link between scholarly analysis and artistic practice. Audience questions focused on the film’s structure, its portrayal of creative communities under wartime conditions, and the ethics of representation. Kureichik’s broader participation, including his graduate paper on Roman Brovko’s Zaboronenyi / Censored (2019, Ukraine), further underscored the symposium’s cross-border intellectual scope.

Extending these discussions into the next generation of scholarship, the graduate student panel enriched the symposium by introducing emerging perspectives on topics such as the afterlives of Chornobyl in visual culture, the phenomenology of spectatorship in representations of violence, and the intersection of formal experimentation and political resistance. These contributions demonstrated both the breadth of new research and the field’s evolving methodological range at a moment when Ukrainian film studies depends on sustained institutional growth. Just as importantly, the panel underscored the symposium’s role as a space for mentoring and intellectual exchange. The inclusion of early-career scholars was not merely additive but constitutive of the event’s vitality, fostering dialogue across academic generations and supporting the development of future specialists in the field.

The symposium’s keynote lecture by Vitaly Chernetsky, “Mapping Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema,” provided an essential conceptual framework for the event as a whole. A prominent scholar of Ukrainian and East European cinema, Chernetsky has played a central role in establishing Ukrainian film studies within North American academia through his extensive publications and editorial work. His lecture traced the development of Ukrainian cinema from the late Soviet period to the present, emphasising both its increasing global visibility and the need to move beyond reductive national frameworks. By situating Ukrainian cinema within transnational networks of production and circulation, he offered a synthetic perspective that resonated across the symposium’s panels and screenings.

Taken together, the Ukraine New Cinema Symposium represents a significant contribution to the consolidation of Ukrainian film studies within North American academia. By integrating film screenings with sustained scholarly analysis, it modelled an interdisciplinary approach attentive to the complexities of contemporary media culture. While the symposium’s focus on war was both necessary and productive, future iterations might expand attention to non-war genres and longer-term industrial developments within Ukrainian cinema. The organisers expressed a clear intention to develop the symposium into an annual gathering that will rotate across institutions, further strengthening its transnational scope. The location of the 2027 symposium is to be announced, while Pennsylvania State University is scheduled to host the event in 2028, pending final approval.

At a moment when Ukraine occupies a central place in global political consciousness, the symposium demonstrated that its cinema offers more than illustrative narratives of conflict. It constitutes a dynamic aesthetic field through which the conditions of modern warfare and their cultural consequences are critically engaged, while also generating new forms of cinematic and scholarly collaboration.

Yuliya V. Ladygina, PhD

The Pennsylvania State University

yvl5866@psu.edu

Bio

Yuliya V. Ladygina is associate professor of Russian and Global and International Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research in Eastern European literatures and cultures focuses on questions of cultural memory and cultural exchange. She is the author of Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and she is currently working on her second book project, The Reel Story of the Euromaidan and the Russian-Ukrainian War, which examines the post-2014 cycle of Ukrainian war films and their perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization. Her articles on related subjects appeared in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.

Filmography

Brovko, Roman. 2019. Zaboronenyi / Censored. Um Group.

Dudko, Anna. 2023. Mokosh.

Gutnik, David. 2023. Rule of Two Walls. Park Pictures, 2Brave Productions, Illuminated Content, Stacey Reiss Productions.

Kotsiuba, Iuliia. 2023. Moia shafa / My Closet. Avtoritet Studio.

Lyskov, Mykyta. 2025. Kyivs’kyi tort / Kyiv Cake. Eesti Joonisfilm.

Melnyk, Sofiia. 2023. Sto nochei / Mariupol. A Hundred Nights.

Muratova, Kira. 1992. Chutlyvyi militsioner / The Sentimental Policeman. Parimedia, Primodessa Film.

Oleksiy Radynski, 2023. Chornobyl 22. Grupa Kinotron, The Reckoning Project.

Vasyanovych, Valentyn. 2019. Atlantyda / Atlantis. Harmata film, Limelite/ForeFilm.

Suggested Citation

Ladygina, Yuliya V. 2026. “Mapping War, Memory, and Mediation: The Ukraine New Cinema Symposium at Yale (March 27–29, 2026)”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.449

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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