Ukrainian Female Filmmakers and the Mobilization of Memory

Lecture by by Professor Małgorzata Radkiewicz.

The seminar will focus on contemporary documentaries exploring how filmmakers mobilize cultural memory to narrate the experience of war. Drawing on the theories of Ann Rigney, Astrid Erll, and Marianne Hirsch, as well as feminist frameworks such as the Women Mobilizing Memory project, the talk explores women’s memory practices as ethical, affective, and politically engaged forms of storytelling. From this perspective, selected Ukrainian documentaries are approached not merely as representations of war, but as cinematic interventions that shape how war is remembered, narrated, and understood. By foregrounding women filmmakers and their creative strategies, the lecture highlights how documentary cinema participates in constructing cultural memory and responding to the ongoing realities of war.

Professor Małgorzata Radkiewicz is a professor of film studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her research focuses on women’s creativity in film, photography, and video art. Her three monographs (2002, 2010, 2022, in Polish) examine women directors, artists, and female audiences. In Modern Women on Cinema (2016) she studies Polish female film critics of the 1920s and 1930s, drawing on original articles and archival materials. Her work also includes research on transnational film heritage, such as her article on Polish-Jewish film producer Maria Hirszbein published in Camera Obscura (2021) and her chapter on Pola Negri in the volume Stretching the Archives (2024). Together with Elżbieta Ostrowska she recently edited the book Women and Polish Cinema: Reclaiming the Frame (2026).