From a cinematic perspective, the Chornobyl accident became one of the most generative episodes in Ukrainian film history. The explosion of Reactor No. 4 triggered an unprecedented surge in film production: between 1986 and 1998, around forty documentaries were produced, alongside only one feature film. This essay examines one of the earliest attempts to represent the disaster, Volodymyr Shevchenko’s Chornobyl. Chronicle of the Hard Weeks (1987), now regarded as a key Chornobyl film. Focusing on its pervasive militarized rhetoric, the essay investigates how wartime language and memory structure the film’s interpretation of what was fundamentally a civilian, technological catastrophe.
Essay by
Stanislav Menzelevskyi
April 23, 2026
Filming from under a history in erasure: Jessica Gorter’s documentary films about Russia’s memory and counter-memory.
By
Irina Sandomirskaja, Ramona Rat and Payam Masarrat
December 18, 2025
The month of December began with three days of a much-awaited Symposium on the 30th Anniversary of the USSR’s Fall with the presence of film director Sergei Loznitsa in Stockholm. The Symposium, organized and realized by Professor Irina Sandormirsakaja, took place at Södertörn University and at the Swedish Film Institute between December 1-3, 2021.
By
Cecilia Sá Cavalcante Schuback
December 14, 2021
The documentary film Liebe Oma, Guten Tag! What we leave behind (2017) by sisters Jūratė and Vilma Samulionytė tackles persistent silences within one family in Lithuania in a telling way for how sensitive the past is in the Baltic and East European context.
By
Margaret Tali
February 12, 2021
This paper analyzes Soviet and Russian spy films with respect to maintaining and transmitting memories of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) in popular culture. The new Russian post-Soviet cinema (after the 2000s) about the “war spies” is considered not only with regard to its entertainment and ideological functions, but also with regard to its function as a “post-memory” of the traumatic experiences of the war and the Nazi occupation. The new Russian cinema about espionage and spies reinterprets the issues of dependent people, Stalinist repressions, and traumatic memories that were absent in Soviet cinema.
Essay by
Viktoriya Sukovata
June 17, 2019
A Day of the World (Den’ mira) was a documentary volume, published in 1937, that was intended to provide a snapshot of the entire globe on a single day, September 27, 1935. The tensions within and around A Day of the World capture some of the basic contradictions in socialist realism, the official aesthetic method of Soviet art: between publicity and intimacy and between the dream of synchronous, global revolution and the aberrant temporalities of individual experience.
By
Robert Bird
November 10, 2017
While the film Papusza certainly represents part of a growing interest in and awareness of Romani matters among the Polish and international public, one should not overestimate its value as an eye-opener to Romani history. Rather, it constitutes a fascinating and beautiful story of a lifetime on the margins.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
May 12, 2015
Literary scholar David Williams analyzes Ulrich Seidl’s film Import/Export and criticizes Seidl for using and humiliating amateur actors with the aim of telling a story that ultimately only underscores a stereotypical image of the East: as precisely an object of pleasure for the West.
By
David Williams
January 21, 2014
Issue 2026, 1: 
Issue 2026, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.