Masha Godovannaya

On April 14, 2014 Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a right-wing politician, publicly attacked two female journalists simply because one of them asked about the sanctions against Ukraine. He ordered to his guards “rape” and “kiss her hard” regardless of her pregnancy and threatened another one with unemployment when she defended her colleague. None of male journalists stood behind the women and tried to stop the high-ranked attacker and his followers.

A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.

This film is the record of a traumatic reaction to the terrorist acts in the Moscow subway of March 29, 2010.

The film is conceived as a free cinematic improvisation vaguely based on the myth of the Phoenix.

A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.

This film is an exploration of unseen but intensely felt encounters: dreams. The fear – maternal fear – of loss, of separation from a child creeps into the self, bypassing the defence mechanism. Fear expands in dreams. The film’s images become a potential substitute and a release from the terror of these haunting, unimaginable sensations.

A letter from the dead dog Laika, the first conqueror of space. This is the story of her heroic deeds and martyrdom, a document of one of many lives it was deemed necessary to sacrifice in the name of the human plan for conquest and domination.

For a long time Saint Patrick has been touted as the redemptor of Pagan Ireland: the man who rid the country of its snake population. We felt it was time the snakes got their due – You Can’t Keep A Good Snake Down redresses this historical imbalance.

As if in response to Susan Suleiman’s aphorism on motherhood “Mothers don’t write, they are written” and Julia Kristeva’s question “After the Virgin [Mary] what do we know about the inner discourse of a mother?” I decided to do a film on my own experience as a mother who is also an artist and the ambivalent but poignant process of inscribing a child into my life.

It is my endeavor to stop time for a moment and to look through a different prism at things which have been around us for so long, forgotten and unnoticeable by us for so long. Forest, lake, meadow, sky... twilight... moon.

“MUZHCHINI”, when pronounced by emphasizing every letter, means “mature men” in Russian. It is a catchphrase of Yevgeniy Yufit, the father of the Russian necrorealist movement and the hero of the film. This word well describes his attitude towards and interest in specific elements of Russian masculinity, which have been among the several themes of his own films. The second protagonist is Yuri Zverlin, an artist from St. Petersburg and star of Yufit’s feature “Killed by Lightning”; the third, an anonymous “Lenfilm” filmmaker. We were on a trip to the sacred monastery of lake Seliger; it all started inside its ecological pyramid, built without single nail supposedly maintaining the equilibrium of the region. It has no effect on us…

An idiosyncratic personal reflection on a mythical image of masculinity in cinema and the clash between cinematic representation and real life. Endlessly repeated shots of aeroplanes and paratroopers taken from Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Aerograd (1935) and an absurd anthem to mythical masculine powers are confronted by home video footage with a much less heroic intonation.

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A found-footage film that exhilarates via virtuosic editing, this homage to early Soviet-era cinema pioneer Sergei Eisenstein reconfigures extracts from several of the maestro’s classics—such as Battleship Potemkin—into something fresh and provocative. Inspired by Eisenstein’s seminal montage theories, the director works in tandem with composer Federico Schmucler to thrillingly evoke tumult.

The film is based on a text by an art historian Koivo on how architectural elements of the past find themselves in mundane structures of our everyday. Together we walked Vienna in search of these architectural residues and their inscription into the urban landscape with the haunted history.

This film is a personal dedication to New York, “a city symphony” to the place which means so much to me…

"This video is dedicated to Peterhof, the suburb of St. Petersburg where I used to live"

A feature-length experimental documentary that captures traces of queer existence and intimate arrangements lived by non-privileged queers who navigate their experiences of migration in the city of Vienna. The film unfolds narratives of five queer migrants from contexts outside of the Global North which have been marked by gender violence, homophobia, economic instability, and social misbalance. Beyond narratives of damage, marginality is lived through and treated in the film as a space for emancipation and resistance – full of humor and joy, dignity and erotic, emancipation and struggle.

A film representing a stroll through St. Petersburg. Captured by a broken frame composition, deserted streets, frozen city infrastructure, stone embankments, pigeons in parks, dandelions breaking through the pavements, aberrations of color and light evoke an increasing sense of unease. Ambient sounds—random conversations, city noises, and a track composed by Mexican sound artist Enrique Arriaga—merge with the visuals, making the film a direct speech of a human/camera/witness about what clearly audible in the actual urban space.

On March 18, 2014 President Putin gave a speech to both chambers of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. He declared the Crimea as a part of the Russian Federation. He said: “Esteemed friends, we have gathered here today because of an issue that is of vital importance, of historical significance for us all. On March 17, a referendum took place in the Crimea; it was held in full compliance with democratic procedures and the norms of international law. Voter turnout was more than 82 %. More than 96 % voted for reunification with Russia. The figures are extremely compelling.” He gave the speech. The war continues. The plague have started.