Special Guest Scheduled to Appear
Portraits in Permafrost: Cinema of the Russian Arctic
Beyond the Arctic Circle, a mining community keeps life interesting in unusual spaces. Q&A to follow—read on for more!
Natalija Yefimkina’s Garagenvolk explores a different way of life in the Russian far North—garage settlements. Set in the Kola Peninsula, beyond the Arctic Circle, the film follows the lives of men in a mining community who utilize garages for either hobbies or businesses. Garagenvolk creates a lively and unorthodox representation of life in the Russian far North, alive with humor, spirituality, and irreverence. [95 mins; documentary; Russian with English subtitles] A Q&A with Dr. Marya Rozanova-Smith and Prof. Russell Scott Valentino will follow the screening.
Dr. Marya Rozanova-Smith is a professorial lecturer in the Elliott School of International Affairs and a research professor at the Department of Geography at the George Washington University. In addition to her work in academia, she participated in a wide range of social projects. She was the founder and chairperson of the Center for Civil, Social, Scientific, and Cultural Initiatives “STRATEGIA” and served as a Galina Starovoitova Fellow for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Kennan Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr. Rozanova-Smith has been teaching the Arctic Affairs course at GWU in the Elliott School of International Affairs since 2018. Her current research interests include Arctic governance, urban sustainability, gender empowerment, and the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Arctic.
Russell Scott Valentino is the chair of IU’s Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures department. He has written two scholarly monographs, co-edited three collections of scholarly and artistic works, and translated eight books of literature from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Italian, and Russian. His reviews, essays, short fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines and scholarly journals, including The New York Times, the Harvard Review, Words Without Borders, Poroi, and the Buenos Aires Review. He is also the founder and senior editor of Autumn Hill Books, chair of the board at Slavica Publishers, as well as co-chair on an NEH-funded project at the Center for Cultural Affairs in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, exploring the essential linkage between the humanities and cultural affairs.
