Filmmaker’s Hands in the Archives

Filmmaker’s Hands in the Archives

For this project, we’ve invited six animation and experimental filmmakers to create works using unselected Soviet films from a donation by collector François Lemai.

Filmmaker Theodore Ushev reimagines Eisenstein’s The Old and the New, giving it a new historical dimension, with “the Old” now becoming the USSR, and “the New” becoming Putin’s Russia. For her part, Canadian-Austrian experimental filmmaker Michaela Grill revisits the themes of her recent films (species loss, the ecological divide), by rearranging images from several Soviet dystopian fictions. Image from the film L’ancien et le nouveau (effacé), Theodore Ushev, Quebec, 2025. In La dureté du mental, filmmaker and performer Charles-André Coderre offers us a tactile re-working and re-editing of Soviet sports films from the 1980s featuring wrestling and pole vaulting. The remaining three films question the cinematic landscape through the lens of intimacy. Canadian-Bulgarian filmmaker Ralitsa Doncheva creates a self-portrait by reusing a 35 mm print of an unfinished film by Alexander Sokurov. Erin Weisgerber, a Canadian of Ukrainian descent, works with this same film to express the passage of time through image manipulation. For his part, Steven Woloshen refilms in 65 mm several landscape shots from Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven, by Moldovan-born filmmaker Emil Loteanu.

Keywords

Experimental cinema, archives