Screening of films / Remember Mariupol

Around a dialogue with Camille Leprince, researcher, curator and programmer, Zoya Laktionova will present several of her films made since 2018 and excerpts from her new project in progress, which she is currently shooting in Ukraine. 

Zoya Laktionova was born in 1984 in Mariupol in a working class family. Since the mid-2000s, her artistic practice falls under two disciplines: documentary film and contemporary art. In this way, her films are screened in film festivals as well as in museums and art galleries. His approach adopts micro-history, autoethnography and creative storytelling to reveal the complexities of major events and historical context. From the forced industrialization of Mariupol during the Soviet era to the conflict in Donbass in 2014 and the war that has spread throughout the country since 2022, Zoya Laktionova thus traces the history of Ukraine through that of her native region and her family.

A series of photos of Marioupol will be presented and will be projected amongst others:

Diorama (2018, 12', VOSTF)

In Marioupol, life flows in its daily reality, but suddenly something elusive changes its course. All that is left is the possibility of immersing oneself in memories where everything is preserved like in a museum. The inhabitants remember the life of the past, when the mines did not ruin the coastline, when the fauna was abundant. 

Remember the smell of Mariupol (2022, 5')

Living an experience of two months abroad in a state of two realities between a strange serenity and the war in Ukraine, the artist makes two landscapes interact. She mixes family archive photos and texts written in the first weeks of the Russian military invasion. The work absorbs one landscape into another, keeping the mystery of the emergence of a third landscape resulting from the operation.

Ashes settling in layers on the surface (in progress, 70')

Based on diaries and photographs found in the destroyed houses in Mariupol during the war, the film tells the story of the construction and self-destruction of a totalitarian system.

This meeting will be held in English.

_{Image: (c) Zoya Laktionova, Diorama (2018, 12')}