‘Ukrainian poetic cinema: the flowering and the tragedy’ with Vitaly Chernetsky | Kino 2026

The seminar delves into the history of the rise and the tragic deliberate destruction by the Soviet state of a remarkable school of innovative filmmaking that arose in Ukraine in the early 1960s and came to be known as the Ukrainian poetic cinema. The films of Leonid Osyka, especially A Stone Cross (1968), his masterpiece, will form its core. Osyka’s approach to filmmaking is contrasted to that of his friend and mentor, Serhii Parajanov, to emphasise the internal diversity within Ukrainian poetic cinema. The rediscovery and rethinking of Ukrainian cinema of the 1960s in regional and global contexts will also be part of our focus.

Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007) and of numerous other publications on Slavic and East European literatures and cultures that highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts.

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See all eight Kino seminars here.