Ukrainian cinema of the 1990s: from free market to free fall with Stanislav Menzelevskyi | Kino 2025

While we celebrate the independence of Ukraine on 24 August 1991, the processes that brought it about began much earlier and continue to evolve today. Ukrainian cinema in the late 1980s—early 1990s is a contradictory phenomenon—a spontaneous cinematic response to one of the most dramatic and unsettled periods in the country’s history, marked by a collision of hope and despair, fleeting exhilaration followed by deep disillusionment. This era in film not only reflects the transformation of society driven by the advent of a free market, but also highlights the intense, ongoing struggle between personal freedom and institutional power. The films we will consider in this seminar address shifting ideas of sexuality, the consumerisation of society, the rise of a market economy, the reassessment of the totalitarian past, and the influx of mystical practices. As such, Ukrainian cinema became an arena where new symbolic systems were forged, aiming to represent a new physical and metaphysical reality in the post-Chornobyl era.

Stanislav Menzelevskyi is a film scholar, archivist, and co-founder of Medusa independent publishing project, with a decade of experience as the Head of the Research and Programming Department at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre. He’s currently working on his PhD project at Indiana University.

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