Thursday (13.02) with the screening of A Bit of a Stranger (2024), a documentary by Ukrainian filmmaker Svitlana Lishchynska. Svitlana was born in Mariupol during Soviet times. In her film, she looks at the experiences of four generations of women, including her own, and examines the effects of Soviet project, of its dismantling after 1991, and eventually of the war on the sense of personal and communal belonging. When mirrored in the microcosm of one’s family saga, the abstractions of totalitarianism, Russification, denationalization, nationalization, and decolonization open up for new horizons of interpretation and reflection.

With a discussion by a Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko  (Freie Universitaet), whose recent book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine From Maidan to War (Verso, 2024) explores among other things the fate of the community of the so called ‘Soviet Ukrainians’ in post-Soviet Ukraine as well as the vagaries of the discourse of decolonization.