Congratulations to Dr. Lida Oukaderova, Associate Professor of Art History and co-director of the Program in Cinema & Media Studies, for editing the new book ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko, which includes a series of articles by an international group of scholars on the cinema of the much-celebrated but little-researched Ukrainian-born Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko.
The book was published in July 2024 by Edinburgh University Press. In addition to putting together the book and drafting its introduction, Dr. Oukaderova contributed her essay “Larisa Shepitko’s Ecologies.”
About the book:
Despite the brief span of her directorial career, lasting from 1963 to 1979, the Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko produced a remarkable body of work, one that received an expansive national and international attention and led her to winning the Golden Bear Awards at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. ReFocus: The Cinema of Larisa Shepitko is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive, methodologically diverse analysis of Shepitko’s oeuvre, demonstrating the ongoing significance of her work for filmmakers and scholars alike. The book not only considers the emergence of Shepitko’s cinema within Soviet political and cultural history but examines its continued relevance for thinking about such pressing contemporary issues as war and trauma, history, memory and subjectivity, and ecology and the environment.