Holidays (2022) dir Antoine Cattin

Antoine Cattin’s documentary Holidays was shot in St Petersburg over the course of one year. Closely observing several protagonists from different walks of life and punctuating his narrative by seven important national holidays Cattin was able to catch more than just quotidian existence. Out of everyday struggles and collective celebrations emerges a deeply authentic and deeply unsettling portrait of the nation on the brink of the war.

Note: unfortunately, Marijeta Bozovic is no longer able to join the event due to illness. Anastasia Kostina will provide comment.

Watch the trailer.

Speakers

Marijeta Bozovic is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, with secondary appointments in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (Northwestern, 2016) and Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union (Harvard, 2023); and co-editor of the volumes Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River and Nabokov Upside Down. She is currently working on a co-authored book with Benjamin Peters entitled Imagining Russian Hackers: Myths of Men and Machines (due out with Chicago in 2024). Bozovic is Co-editor of the journal Slavic Literatures; Film and Media Editor of Slavic Review, and Associate Editor of ASAP/Journal.

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.