Shamara

Based on Svetlana Vasilenko’s 1990 novella, the film follows Zina Shamarina, a rebellious woman living in a factory dormitory whose obsessive love for her husband—who married her to avoid prosecution for a past rape—pushes her between noble gestures and reckless acts. Set against quarantines and fear, Shamara fights for dignity and a sense of self as betrayal and jealousy upend her fragile world.

Retrospective of Ukrainian Cinema in cooperation with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Center and Osteuropa Institut (FU).

Curator: Ivanna Kozak (Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin, UFFB).

Each film will be preceded by a 20-minute introduction lecture by cultural researcher Oleksii Isakov, and followed by a discussion moderated by the UFFB team.

Oleksii Isakov is a cultural studies researcher at the Faculty of Cultural and Social Studies of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His current PhD project focuses on the history of the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

This year, we aim to continue exploring the heritage of Ukrainian cinema, focusing on works from the period after poetic cinema and xx that depicts society in the first early years of Ukrainian independence in the 1990s. These films address the various issues that preoccupied the new, free yet chaotic vulnerable decade that still had to deal with issues and scars from the long hard time before.