Children 404 (2013) directed by Askold Kurov and Pavel Loparev

In 2013, Russia passed a bill forbidding the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” Dubbed as “gay propaganda” law, this legislation put in danger anyone who expressed support for the LGBT community. Askold Kurov and Pavel Loparev’s documentary Children 404 challenged the oppressive ideology of the state by giving voice to dozens of queer teens from Russia. The film incorporates forty-five testimonies from the members of the online community Children 404, named after the common “error 404 - page not found”. Preserving the anonymity of their subjects, the filmmakers created a powerful document about the consequences of the government-endorsed hatred.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Roman Utkim and Anastasia Kostina.

Watch the trailer.

Speakers

Roman Utkin teaches at Wesleyan University, where he is an Associate Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. He is a scholar of modern Russian literature and visual culture. His first book, Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), provides a study of the displaced Russian artists in interwar Berlin at the crossroads between exile and a return to the now-totalitarian homeland. He edited a special issue of the Russian Review devoted to “Illegal Queerness: Russian Culture and Society in the Age of Anti-LGBTQ Censorship.” His current book project is tentatively titled Queer Russia: Genealogies of Difference from the Silver Age to Perestroika.

Anastasia Kostina is a scholar of documentary media, women’s film history, Soviet and Russian cinema. She holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her current book project, Engendering Soviet Documentary: Esfir Shub Between Theory and Practice, explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics and gender during the nascent stage of documentary cinema. The work aims to highlight the career of Esfir Shub, the first female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Anastasia is a co-editor of a collected volume titled The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism, which introduces readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices of contemporary Russophone documentary cinema. In addition, her writings on film and media have been featured in such publications as Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura, and Apparatus.

This film screening is presented as part of The New Russian Documentary, which is inspired by the collected volume of the same title. The series presents a curated selection of essential films that challenge the status quo and offer rare insights into contemporary Russia.