Current research

Solidarity Through Mutual (Un)learning: Embeddedness, Indebtedness and Materiality of Social Justice Film Festivals

The working title of my PhD thesis is Solidarity Through Mutual (Un)learning: Embeddedness, Indebtedness and Materiality of Social Justice Film Festivals. It is a hybrid practice-as-research project as part of which I will be increasingly responsible for curating and coordinating Screening Rights, the West Midlands SJFF directed by my supervisor Michele Aaron. I intend to use that experience as a starting point to research how cinema can affect social change and, more specifically, to study how SJFFs can act as sites of solidarity through mutual (un)learning.

SJFFs are unique both in terms of their programming and the emphasis that they put on the after-screening discussions. Films that are shown at such festivals can be vastly different in terms of their form (from conventional talking-heads documentaries to experimental fiction) and subject matter (from modern-day slavery to ecological collapse to persecution of political activists). Yet in the space of SJFFs they are constructed as "social justice cinema"—one that is committed to a) depicting the enactment of the principles of social justice; b) raising awareness and ideally mobilising its viewers around the pressing issues of past, present and future; and, depending on the viewers' positionality, c) providing them with tools for learning (or unlearning), asserting their knowledge (or recognising their state of not-always-knowing) and direct action (or how to stand in solidarity). SJFFs are designed as "sites of organised unruliness" (Tascon, 2015), facilitating an infrastructure for discussion, debate and decentralised mutual (un)learning between four actors: the audience, the programmer, the invited guests (be it the filmmakers or hosts/chairs) and the film itself. Every SJFF screening is effectively a temporary classroom—a space of/for "study" (Moten, 2013), critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), engaged learning (hooks, 1994) and intellectual emancipation (Ranciere, 2010). It is in this regard that I'm keen to explore the dichotomy between affect and critical thinking (and whether the distinction between the two is blurred when situated in the space of SJFFs) and to examine numerous affective and critical strategies that activist filmmakers and programmers employ in order to engage with their audience as part of a live social gathering that is a SJFF.

I'm also interested in combating the ephemerality of the festivals by their active documentation and in exploring the inherent paradox of the festivals in that they exist as both unique localised events and archived data accessible across space and time. In addition to the 40,000-word thesis I will present a portfolio in an as-of-yet unspecified form, which might potentially include the redesigned website of the festival containing commissioned texts about the films programmed at SRFF, interviews with filmmakers, documentation of the Q&As, and more. The portfolio will be closely linked to the theoretical body of the PhD and will contribute to finding an answer to the question of whether it is possible to calculate and document something as intangible as social change.

Supervisor: Michele Aaron

Background

I'm a russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent (he/they/) and an author, translator, film critic, and curator. I hold a Specialist (BA+MA) degree in Film Studies (2019) from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography aka VGIK, the oldest film school in the world and the premier film school in russia. My dissertation titled Privatisation of Utopia: Strategies of Deconstruction of the Socialist Realist Canon in the Post-Soviet Historical Cinema examined four films of the 1990s-2010s—namely, Hammer and Sickle by Sergey Livnev, Volga Volga by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Angels of Revolution by Aleksey Fedorchenko and My Dear Hans by Aleksandr Mindadze—that applied various disruptive tactics to rethink, critique and destabilise the socialist realist canon. My PhD research at VGIK about the representation of sex work in three contemporary television shows—namely, The Deuce, The Girlfriend Experience and The Handmaid's Tale—has been cut short after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Upon leaving russia due to the risk of political persecution because of my pro-Ukrainian stance, I have ceased to affiliate myself with VGIK as it had openly supported the invasion.

Having served as a cultural mediator for two renowned contemporary art institutions in russia, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (2015) and V-A-C Foundation (2018), I've coordinated mediation for the first-ever national pavilion of Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale (2022). I've been an invited film programmer at Garage (a programme on New German Cinema, 2022) and Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (a programme on collective filmmaking, 2020). My work as an English-to-russian translator includes Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2020) and On Freedom (2021) and Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (2023). My first book, a collection of autofiction titled Doramaroman, has been released by No Kidding Press in 2022.

My writing on film and contemporary art has appeared in various publications such as Seance, Afisha, Iskusstvo Kino and Spectate. As a film critic I have written on the representation of labour (particularly its precarious forms in the cinema of Olivier Assayas); the representation of sex work in the filmography of Pier Paolo Pasolini; Asian American and Latin American experience in film and TV; LGBTQ+ cinema (with a particular focus on cinema by trans and gender-nonconforming filmmakers); experimental cinema; and riot grrrl, punk and no wave cinema. Filmmakers whom I interviewed include Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Amalia Ulman, Gia Coppola, Josephine Decker and Hailee Steinfield. Filmmakers I profiled include Barbara Hammer, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar-Wai.

Research interests: participatory, collective and activist filmmaking and programming; the ethics of film programming; film festival studies; expanded and experimental cinema and artists’ moving image; cinema and contemporary art; cinema and autofiction; queer and female-led cinema; cinema and inclusion; film festivals as sites of (un)learning and solidarity; South-to-South collaborations; cultural mediation; critical, radical, engaged and affective pedagogy; the regions of Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia.

Research output and memberships

Member of BAFTSS

11th BAFTSS Conference, 3-5 April 2023, University of Lincoln, UK / Sustainable Futures: Ethics, Responsibility and Care in Film, Television, Screen Studies and Practice / presentation entitled Detoxifying the Archive: Remakes, Revisions, Reenactments

3rd Film Festivals Symposium, Apr 7-9, 2023, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey / Film Festivals, Funds and Film Industry / presentation entitled Behind the Scenes, Beneath the Screen: Subtitle Translation as the Means of Pedagogy, a Form of Precarious Labour and a Kind of Artistry (or, Two Summers of a Subtitle Translator at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival)

Film and Television Studies Departmental Research Day, May 10, 2023, University of Warwick, UK / presentation entitled Where Affect and Critical Thinking Meet: Social Justice Film Festivals as Sites of Engaged Learning and Knowledge Production

Film and Television Studies Departmental Research Day, May 15, 2023, University of Warwick, UK / presentation entitled Film Festivals as Sites of Solidarity Through Mutual (Un)learning

Saying Nothing To Say: Sense, Silence and Impossible Texts in the 20th Century, May 13, 2024, University of Warwick, UK / presentation entitled The Quiet Actress of Disquieting Presence: The Restless Spirit of Yekaterina Golubeva

Visible Evidence XXIX: Documentary Ecologies, Sep 6-9, 2023, University of Udine, Italy / presentation entitled From Invisibility to Hypervisibility: Autofiction, Diffuse Authorship, and Digitality in russian LGBTQ+ Documentaries of the 2010s

email: misha.zakharov@warwick.ac.uk

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instagram: @m_m_zakharov