Editors: Elena Stishova, senior editor of Iskusstvo Kino, the main film studies journal in Russia, will introduce each film and is available for interviews. Contact CU-Boulder Professor Rima Salys at (303) 545-9678.
The first and only film series to document the lives of women in nine former Soviet republics since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 will be presented at the University of Colorado at Boulder March 12-13.
The nine-film documentary series "Gender Montage: Paradigms in Post-Soviet Space" will be shown from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, March 12, and continue on Saturday, March 13, from noon to 4 p.m. in Eaton Humanities Building room 150. It is free and open to the public.
The event is sponsored by the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Germanic and Slavic languages and literature department and the film studies department.
The burdens on the women of post-Soviet republics, especially in the Central Asian countries where the disintegration of the Soviet Union led to conditions of economic collapse as well as a resurgence of fundamentalist values that often victimize women in these societies, are primary themes in the films.
Elena Stishova, a film critic and senior editor for Iskusstvo Kino, Russia's premier film journal, will be on campus for the event and will introduce each film.
The films offer a diverse view of the conditions of women in the nine countries, according to Professor Rima Salys of the Germanic and Slavic languages and literature department who arranged for the series to come to CU-Boulder.
"The views range from optimism in the face of economic difficulty in the Baltic republics to the energizing force of the matriarchal tradition in the Ukraine to despair over the exploitation of women trapped between resurgent patriarchal values and economic collapse in several Central Asian states," she said. "And yet the most egalitarian and harmonious portrait of gender relations in the series is the story of a woman rug maker from the mountains of Kyrgsystan."
The presence of both residual Soviet values and unintended uses of Western technology also emerge in the subtexts of several of the documentaries, according to Salys. One film is about a nationalist scout leader in Estonia striving to create a happy collectivist life for her girls, while another is about the widespread use of ultrasounds to routinely abort female fetuses in Azerbaidzhan.
The nine films were commissioned in an open competition sponsored by the Soros Foundation's Network Women's Program, the Open Society Institute-Russia and the Gender Policy Institute. Each film was scripted and shot by local filmmakers from each country.
For more information about the film series visit the Web site or call (303) 545-9678.