Carceral Cinema, Intermission: Gay Propaganda

Carceral Cinema is a two-year project designed to spark conversations. Carcerality, representations of prisons, and race and gender in the context of incarceration are explored through the lens of film.

Following a sold-out screening of pioneering films about women in North American prisons at Flatpack 2025, Carceral Cinema returns with a second installment. This special event brings together live presentation, a rarely screened tape, and a discussion, all centred on state-legislated homophobia and incarceration in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.

The event will conclude with a conversation between Misha Zakharov and PhD researcher Gina Matuska, followed by an audience Q&A.

Gina's research at Birmingham City University focuses on local queer cinema heritage.

Programme

Gay Propaganda: A Live Desktop Essay by Misha Zakharov
Tracing various models of incarceration - from Soviet criminalisation to the legal constructs of ‘gay propaganda’ and ‘LGBT extremism’ in contemporary Russia - this live desktop presentation features a collage of pieces of legislation, prison letters, court statements, and excerpts from prison memoirs.

Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (Dir: John Greyson, 1986)
Canadian experimental filmmaker John Greyson recounts his trip to the Soviet Union as part of the Canadian delegation to the Youth Festival in Moscow in 1985. A pun on the Oscar-winning Soviet heterosexual rom-com Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1981), Greyson’s short film attempts to make sense of the decline of Soviet sexual emancipation and the emergence of the queer underground.

Curated by Misha Zakharov