In post-Soviet documentary discourse, “reality” has become a hot topic. After decades of state censorship and ideological restrictions during the Soviet period, documentarians became fascinated with the opportunity to bear witness to immediate “reality” and transfer it to the screen. The arrival of digital technology in the early 2000s spearheaded further developments in documentary cinema and prompted a vigorous debate among film practitioners, for whom the 2000s became a time of manifestos and heated arguments about the relationship between the documentary image and immediate reality. This talk seeks to investigate the concept of documentary reality as it was perceived by the key documentary directors of the era, including Sergei Loznitsa, Vitaly Mansky, Aleksandr Rastorguev, and Marina Razbezhkina, among others. Looking at their theoretical thought in conjunction with their film practice, the talk explores a historically brief yet crucially important period when independent documentary cinema became the “domain of freedom.”
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. Her works on Esfir Shub have been translated into French and Chinese. 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. In addition, her 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
