Please join the Harriman Institute, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Department of Slavic Languages, and Film & Media Studies at Columbia University School of the Arts for a one-day symposium organized by Anastasia Kostina.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Aleksandr Rastorguev emerged as one of the most prominent—and perhaps the most radical—voices of the new Russian documentary, with each of his projects pushing the boundaries of what documentary cinema should look like and what it can do. Rastorguev’s innovative approaches to film were often informed by his theoretical work, which he articulated in a number of manifestos published in leading Russian cinema journals.
His Little Mothers (2001) and Tender’s Heat: Wild, Wild Beach (2006) explored unadorned Russian reality through raw observational aesthetics. In I Love You (2011) Rastorguev and his frequent collaborator Pavel Kostomarov attempted to decenter the author by placing the camera in the hands of the protagonists — young men from Rastorguev’s native Rostov-on-Don. When mass civil protests in the winter of 2011–2012 highlighted the political urgency of independent documentary cinema in Russia, the filmmaker shifted online, experimenting with new formats and exploring the possibilities of documentary in the age of new media.
In August 2018, Rastorguev was killed in the Central African Republic, where he was filming a project about the notorious Wagner mercenary group. This one-day symposium pays tribute to this important Russian documentary auteur, focusing on his theory of documentary cinema as well as the legacies and afterlife of his projects.
Registration information is forthcoming.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.
Program
2:00pm | Panel: Aleksandr Rastorguev: Looking into the Face of Humanity
- Nico Baumbach
- Nancy Condee
- Anna Nieman
- Ilia Venyavkin
- Anastasia Kostina
4:00pm | Reception
4:30pm | Screening 1: Little Mothers / Mamochki (2001), dir. Aleksandr Rastorguev
- Introduction by Anna Nieman
6:00pm | Screening 2: Rastorguev (2021), dir. Evgenia Ostanina
- Introduction by Anastasia Kostina
Biographies
Nico Baumbach is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Anonymous Image: Cinema Against Control (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). He is also working on a book on the relation between critical theory and conspiracy theory.
Nancy Condee is senior faculty in Slavic and Film & Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in New Left Review, Washington Post, The Nation, as well as Iskusstvo kino, Seans, Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Novaia gazeta, Pro et contra, and elsewhere. Her volume Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford) received prizes from the Society for Cinema & Media Studies and Modern Language Association. She is Director of Pitt’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES). Prior to REEES, she was inaugural Director of Pitt’s Global Studies Center (Title VI). Recent work includes two editions (both with Alexander and Elena Prokhorov): Cinemasaurus: Russian Film in Contemporary Context and a special issue of the British journal Critical Quarterly entitled Putin ~ Culture, on contemporary Russian culture. They are currently completing an English-language edition of Stanislav Menzelevskiy’s edited collection of essays on Ukrainian cinema, entitled Coal Cinema: Reclaiming Ukraine’s Donbas (Academic Studies Press, 2027).
Yevgeny Gindilis is an independent film producer born on June 12, 1966, in Moscow. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and founding TVINDIE Film Production in 2004, he built a reputation for international co-productions before dedicating his career almost entirely to high-impact political documentaries after 2014. Gindilis utilizes non-fiction storytelling to explore complex historical figures and urgent socio-political themes. He produced The Man Who Was Too Free (2016), a definitive portrait of murdered Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and collaborated closely with filmmaker Alexander Rastorguev on Electing Russia(2018), about opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Following Rastorguev’s tragic murder in 2018, Gindilis produced the biographical documentary, Rastorguev (2021). After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Gindilis moved to Paris where he continues his documentary work supporting films focusing on the realities of the war and anti-regime resistance.
Ilia Veniavkin is a historian, educational designer, and a journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Soviet and Post-Soviet culture and ideology. He published two books — Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and Temple of War, a history of the ideas that made the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine possible. He co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents and now works at Kronika, a civic-tech project founded by PEN America and Bard College dedicated to preserving independent journalism under threat.
Anna Nieman holds a degree in Film Studies from VGIK (State Institute of Cinematography), Moscow. She is a film critic, independent scholar, and content developer. Her interests span late Soviet and post-Soviet narrative and documentary cinema, with a particular focus on the representation of disenfranchised and lower social-strata characters. Anna founded and produced The Garage project (2009-2011) on mubi.com. It served as a curated international VOD platform for emerging and independent filmmakers. While working with Mubi Garage, Anna curated a collection of works by contemporary Russian documentary filmmakers: Kostomarov, Rastorguev, filmmakers of Albatross Studio, and others. Anna’s articles, reviews, and essays have been published in Art of Film (Iskusstvo kino), Film Studies Journal (Kinovedcheskie zapiski), mubi.com, kultpro.ru, kinokultura.com.
Anastasia Kostina is a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with a joint appointment as a lecturer in Film Studies. She holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her current book project, Between Theory and Practice: Esfir Shub and the Engendering of Soviet Documentary, explores the early history of documentary cinema by studying the career of Esfir Shub, the first female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Anastasia has recently published a collected volume titled The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), which she co-edited with Masha Shpolberg. The volume introduces readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices of contemporary Russophone documentary cinema. In addition, Anastasia’s writings on film and media have been featured in such publications as Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Russian and East European Journal, KinoKultura, and Apparatus
