Dealing with Soviet reality: Kira Muratova’s films as a distorted mirror, smashed to pieces | Kino 2025

No one has analysed Soviet reality and its various manifestations, the nature of violence, and its traces better than the filmmaker Kira Muratova. Although her films may appear absurdist and fantastical, they most accurately convey the essence of the processes she encountered in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, offering us effective tools to deal with this often traumatic experience and discuss it today. In this seminar, we will explore the methods Muratova employs to deconstruct Soviet rhetoric and dismantle traditional hierarchies—not only between different social groups but also between humans and animals, living beings and objects, dialogues and various soundscapes. In her films, all these elements are granted equal rights to exist within a single frame. Nothing remains secondary—or rather, everything becomes secondary at once. In this way, the aesthetic form of her films becomes its content, and editing, as the director herself states, emerges as the true protagonist of the film.

Anna Onufriienko is a cultural studies researcher, a co-curator of exhibitions on Ukrainian cinema and art, a programme coordinator for numerous retrospective film programmes, a co-editor of several books about Ukrainian Soviet films and visual culture. From 2014 to 2022, she was a film critic and programmer at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre (the Ukrainian film archive).

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