Misha Zakharov

Current research

Screening Rights and Worlding Screens: South-South Solidarity Film Events and World-Making from Below

As part of this practice-based project, I examined how carefully curated film events that hyphenate and juxtapose different parts of the Global South (particularly regions formerly described as the ‘Second' and ‘Third’ Worlds) can help us address both Western and Eastern colonial histories, make the world differently from below (as opposed to map-making from above), and instigate solidarity among diverse communities in the UK (especially those with migratory, diasporic, and refugee experiences). Building on site-specific, situated, and self-critical experience gained through curating two editions of Screening Rights (2023-24), a social justice film festival held in the uniquely diverse region of the West Midlands, shaped by postcolonial and labour migration, I developed a framework for thinking about and eventising these South-South encounters. This framework draws on film festival studies (Salazkina, 2023), film festival (auto)ethnography and accounts of film programming (Desai, 2020), decolonial theory (Azoulay, 2019), and theories of learning (hooks, 1994).

In this thesis, I consider processes of (un)learning among multiple actors — both human and non-human — converging within the space of the South-South film event: filmmakers, guest curators, audiences, special activities (such as introductions, discussions, walking tours, and communal meals), venues, and festival ephemera (including the festival website, commissioned responses, trailer, brochure, and documentation of post-screening discussions). I also explore South-South film aesthetics and modes of production, drawing on the notions of embodied navigation (Anzaldúa, 1987), collaborative filmmaking and allyship, reparative fabulation (Estefan, 2022), and opacity (Glissant, 1997) as vital strategies for rehearsing, representing, and worlding solidarity within the space of the film event. From this, I develop a theoretical model in which films function as boundary objects (Leigh Star and Griesemer, 1989); guest curators and filmmakers act as mediators (Lind, 2013); special events operate as contact interfaces or sutures; and festival ephemera form an archive of solidarity.

Supervisor: Professor Michele Aaron

Background

I am a russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent (he/they) as well as a pro-Ukrainian political 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.

Collaborative film events

As a guest curator, I have collaborated with a range of festivals and institutions in London and Birmingham, staging events around themes such as:

• nature, architecture, and colonialism in Central Asia (London Short Film Festival, ICA & Zoroastrian Centre, London, January 2026);
• Palestinian-ESEA solidarity (MilkTea Films, Charlotte Street Hotel, London, September 2025);
• curating cross-community solidarity film events (Independent Cinema Office, in collaboration with Radical Exhibition Collective and Falasteen on Film, MAC Birmingham, September 2025);
• queer migration in and out of the Maghreb region (Queer Migrations exhibition at the Firepit Gallery, curated by the Bold Mellon Collective, where I made my filmmaking debut with a desktop essay titled Open Bodies, Cold Lands, London, July 2025);
• queer imaginings in Central Asia (Atlas Cinema, in collaboration with queer refugees and asylum seekers from Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, London, June 2025);
• incarcerated women in North American prisons (Flatpack Festival, Mockingbird Cinema, Birmingham, May 2025);
• queer icons from Central Asia (Queer East, UCL East, with a libretto designed by Uzbekistan-based micro design bureau undash crew, London, April 2025);
• epistemic violence across regions of the Global South (King’s College London, in collaboration with Belarusian diasporic Skaryna Press, April 2025);
• Koryo-Saram, the descendants of Soviet Koreans (London Migration Film Festival, The Ritzy, in collaboration with Koryo-Saram creatives, November 2024).

Research interests: film events; refugee world-making from below; South-South solidarity; 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; 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

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instagram: @m_m_zakharov