Misha Zakharov
Current research
Screening Rights and Righting Screens: Curating Solidarity Film Events
This project is a practice-based inquiry into film events as sites of social change. Specifically, I am exploring the potential of carefully curated film events — screenings of selected films, enhanced by additional elements — to instigate solidarity, understood in the broadest sense, but most importantly, South-to-South solidarity between diasporas from various regions of the Global South in the UK. These include communities affected by war, colonialism, and displacement, such as those from Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and the Middle East. By creating points of contact with these diasporas through films, discussions, walking tours, and communal meals, I aim to foster spaces for dialogue, learning, and unlearning between four key actors: the audience, the festival team, the invited guests (whether filmmakers, panellists, or guest curators), and the film itself.
As part of this project, I curated two editions (2023-24) of the titular social justice film festival, Screening Rights (SRFF), originally initiated by my supervisor, Michele Aaron, in 2015. The festival has been held in Coventry and Birmingham, with some events (The Dreams of Others, 2023) or the festival as a whole (Double Bill, 2024) centred on the theme of solidarity. The selected films were not only socially engaged but also formally innovative, prompting reflections on the kinds of formal methods — including collaborative filmmaking, forensic aesthetics, and reenactment — that filmmakers use to visibilise structures of oppression and engage audiences on a deeper level. The impact of these films can be further harnessed by curators through a set of practices, such as eventising, guest curation, and site-specific thinking.
The practical component of the thesis — festival organisation — will be presented as a portfolio, including a redesigned festival website on Cargo featuring materials from the 2024 edition (the festival programme; responses to films — such as short essays, interviews, pieces of experimental writing, and playlists — commissioned from guest curators; the festival trailer and brochure; and video documentation of post-screening discussions), as well as a festival archive hosted on WordPress.
The theoretical component is a 40,000-word thesis, which will draw on several fields of knowledge, including film festival and curatorial studies (Tascon, 2015); engaged, radical, and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Ranciere, 2010; Moten, 2013); theories of spectatorship; decolonial theory; and film analysis. Festival data — including questionnaires, interviews with participants, and video documentation — will be analysed to assess the impact of the events and offer suggestions for how to maximise it.
Supervisor: Michele Aaron
Background
I am a russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent (he/they) as well as a refugee in the UK. I am a London-based author and film worker, with a particular interest in queer and decolonial perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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: Deconstruction of the Socialist Realist Canon in Post-Soviet Historical Cinema examined four films of the 1990s-2010s—namely, Hammer and Sickle by Sergey Livnev (1994), Volga Volga by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (2006), Angels of Revolution by Aleksey Fedorchenko (2014) and My Good Hans by Aleksandr Mindadze (2015)—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, and Josephine Decker. 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, the 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
instagram: @m_m_zakharov
