PROGRAM BOOK

2011 (Trans)National Subjects organizers Reproduction or retransmission of the materials, in whole or in part, in any manner, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, is a violation of copyright law. Editors: Pieter Boulogne, Kris Van Heuckelom

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The past three decades have seen the rise of a transnational European cinema, not only in terms of financing and multilateral co-productions, but also in terms of a growing focus on multi-ethnic themes and realities within the European context. Undoubtedly, the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent (and on-going) enlargement of the European Union have played a major role in this shift from national to European filmmaking. Its most obvious onscreen manifestation is the increased visibility of immigrant groups from former communist countries in recent European film, ranging from Krzysztof Kielowskis Blanc (1994) and Pawe Pawlikowskis Last Resort (2000) to Hans-Christian Schmids Lichter (2003) and Ken Loachs It's a Free World (2007). Through its focus on cinematic representations of post-1989 migrations from the former Eastern Bloc to Western Europe (and vice versa), the [TRANS]National Subjects conference seeks to examine what these films reveal about the cultures and societies producing and consuming these migration narratives and to what extent these images function as a construction site for new (trans)regional, (trans)national, and European identities. The conference is organized by the Research Unit of Slavic Studies (K.U.Leuven), the Centre for Media Culture and Communication Technology (K.U.Leuven) and the Institute of International and European Policy (K.U.Leuven), in close collaboration with the Media, Arts & Design Faculty (KHLimburg/PHLimburg), the Research Group on Cinema & Diaspora (University of Antwerp and Ghent University) and the Cultural Service of the Polish Embassy in Belgium. Officially listed in the cultural calendar of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council in 2011, the [TRANS]National Subjects conference is additionally supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the K.U.Leuven Faculties of Social Sciences and of Arts, the Centre for Russian Studies (K.U.Leuven) and the Permanent Representation of Lithuania to the EU. Special thanks go to the members of our scientific committee (for meticulously reviewing the proposals), Willem Wollebrants (for designing the conference website), Jasmijn Van Gorp (for allowing us to screen Passage), Michiel Kragten (for designing the conference poster and logo), Gerlinde Van den bosch (for paying the bills) and Dr Jeremy Lambert (for handling the contacts with our Polish partners). Apart from that, we thank all participants for travelling to Leuven and hope you will enjoy the conference!

On behalf of the organizing committee,

LEEN ENGELEN & KRIS VAN HEUCKELOM

ORGANIZERS Leen Engelen (Media Arts Design Faculty KHLim & K.U.Leuven) Kris Van Heuckelom (K.U.Leuven) ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Leen Engelen (Media Arts Design Faculty KHLim & K.U.Leuven) Roel Vande Winkel (University of Antwerp) Dorota Rysak (K.U.Leuven) Kris Van Heuckelom (K.U.Leuven) Yves Van Rompaey (K.U.Leuven) Peter Vermeersch (K.U.Leuven) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Daniela Berghahn (University of London) Leen Dhaenens (K.U.Leuven) Leen Engelen (Limburg Catholic University College & K.U.Leuven) Idesbald Goddeeris (K.U.Leuven) Willem Hesling (K.U.Leuven) Philippe Meers (University of Antwerp) Dominique Nasta (Universit Libre de Bruxelles) Dorota Ostrowska (University of London) Sofie Van Bauwel (Ghent University) Jasmijn Van Gorp (University of Utrecht) Kris Van Heuckelom (K.U.Leuven) Roel Vande Winkel (University of Antwerp) Peter Vermeersch (K.U.Leuven)

PROGRAM

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15 (Justus Lipsiuszaal, 8th floor of the Erasmushuis)

9.00-9.30 Registration (Justus Lipsiuszaal) 9.30-10.00 Opening: Welcome by Prof. Luk Draye, Dean of the Faculty of Arts (K.U.Leuven), and Mme Beata Podgrska, Director of the Cultural Service of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Belgium 10.00-11.00 Keynote lecture: Dominique Arel (University of Ottawa, Canada), Europeans on the Move: Cinema as a Research Tool (Chair: Peter Vermeersch) 11.00-11.30 Coffee break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 11.30-13.00 Paper session 1: Cinema and European Migration Policies (Chair: Peter Vermeersch) Ipek Celik (Brown University, Providence, USA), Beyond Criminal and Victim: The Migrant in European Genre Cinema Stanislas Ide (Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium), Questionning the EU's Exclusive Definition of European Identity. The Use of Immigration Narratives in European Political Cinema Kris Van Heuckelom (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), (Un)Polish(ed) Houses. European Migration Cinema and the Domestic Space 13.00-14.30 Lunch break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 14.30-16.30 Paper session 2: Post-1989 National Cinemas Revisited (Chair: Leen Engelen) Petra Hankov (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic), There is No Place Like Home: Czech Postcommunist Cinema and the Refusal to be Transnational Alyssa DeBlasio (Dickinson College, Carlisle, USA), Roming: Screening Nomadism in Czech and Slovak Cinema after 1989 Renata ukaityt (Lithuanian Culture Research Institute & Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre), Transcultural Subjectivities in the Cinematic Worlds of arunas Bartas: The Drift along a Traumatic Past

Julia Kostova (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA), Self-Representation in Recent Bulgarian Cinema 16.30-17.00 Coffee break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 20.00-22.00 Screening of Passage (Ukraine/Belgium/USA, 2010, Zac Murphy & Jasmijn Van Gorp, 15) and Illgal (Belgium 2010, Olivier Masset-Depasse, 90), with an introduction by Leen Engelen (Justus Lipsiuszaal). Organized by the Centre for Russian Studies (K.U.Leuven) and followed by a drink in the main hall of the Erasmushuis.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16 (Justus Lipsiuszaal)

9.30-10.30 Keynote lecture: Dina Iordanova (University of St Andrews, Scotland), Traffic Trajectories: Poverty, Post Communism and Cinematic Representation (Chair: Leen Engelen) 10.30-11.00 Coffee break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 11.00-12.30 Paper session 3: Looking at Each Other: Transnational Encounters (Chair: Dina Iordanova) Justyna Beinek (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA), Here the Toilets Are Cleaner Than Our Baptismal Fonts: The West in Polish Film Before and After 1989 Doru Pop (Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania), Being and Seeing Foreigners in Contemporary Romanian Cinema Joanna Rydzewska (University of Swansea, UK), Ambiguity and Change: Transnational Encounters with Polishness in Contemporary British Cinema 12.30-14.00 Lunch break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 14.00-16.00 Paper session 4: Longing and Returning: Home and Transnational Identity (Chair: Leen Dhaenens) Ana Carolina Bento Ribeiro (Universit Paris 3, France), The Way Back: Images of Returning Migrants in Contemporary Romanian Cinema

Anna Mrozewicz (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Returning to the Unknown Place of Origin: Postmemory, Subjectivity and Narrative Strategies in the Documentary Films of Jacob Kofler (2004) and Jacob Dammas (2007) Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Lund University, Sweden), Arriving in the West Returning to the East. East Germans Revisiting Home in Die Nachrichten (2005) and Der Preis (2011). Klara Bruveris (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia), Defiance, Desire, Despair: Those Who Are Left Behind 16.00-16.30 Coffee break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 16.30-17.30 Paper session 5: Visualizing & Textualizing (Trans)National Identities (Chair: Willem Hesling) Irina Souch (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Linguistic (Un)Intelligibility and Recontextualization of Russian Identities in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises Massimo Locatelli (Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy) & Francesco Pitassio (Universit degli Studi di Udine, Italy), Vesna Goes Faster. Eastern European Actresses and Contemporary Italian Cinema 20.00 Conference dinner (Per Tutti, Ravenstraat 38)

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17 (Justus Lipsiuszaal)

9.30-10.30 Keynote lecture: Ewa Mazierska (University of Central Lancashire, UK), Work, Mobility and Eastern European Cinema (1960s-2000s) (Chair: Kris Van Heuckelom) 10.30-11.00 Coffee break (Main hall of the Erasmushuis) 11.00-12.30 Paper session 6: Masculinity and Femininity (Re)Defined (Chair: Ewa Mazierska) Helga Druxes (Williams College, Williamstown, USA), The Panic over Motherhood: Transnational Labor Migrants in Films by Ciulei, Kougashvili, and Haneke Jakob Ladegaard (Aarhus University, Denmark), Framing Eastern European Women: The Politics of Representation in Ulrich Seidls Import Export

Alexandar Mihailovic (Hofstra University, Hempstead, USA), Desensitized Migrants: Organized Crime in Cronenbergs Eastern Promises and Balabanovs Boiler Room Attendant 12.30-13.00 Conference closing 13.00-14.00 Lunch (Main hall of the Erasmushuis)

ABSTRACTS

DOMINIQUE AREL University of Ottawa, Canada Europeans on the Move: Cinema as a Research Tool
Dominique Arel is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He received BA from the University of Montreal, Master's degree from the McGill University and PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His interests range from nationalism and language politics to politics of identity and the censuses. Arel has co-edited Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (John Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge University Press, 2002). His recent publications include "Orange Ukraine Chooses the West, But Without the East," in Ingmar Bredies, Valentin Yakushik, and Andreas Umland, eds., Aspects of the Orange Revolution. Studies, Reports and Documents on the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Elections, Stuttgart and Hannover: ibidem-Verlag (2008) and "Population Composition as an Object of Political Struggle," in Charles Tilly and Robert Goodin, eds., Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Studies (Oxford University Press, 2005). Email: DAREL@UOTTAWA.CA

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SUNE BECHMANN PEDERSENLund University, Sweden Arriving in the West - Returning to the East. East Germans Revisiting Home in Die Nachrichten (2005) and Der Preis (2011) The present paper wants to investigate cinematic representations of post-89 inner-German migration. So far, the topic has barely been subject to academic scrutiny although it carries interesting perspectives. We are confronted here with difference (East vs. West) but also with similarity (German). The East German moving to the Western side is both a brother and a stranger. The way these two sides are reconciled is suggestive of the larger European phenomenon of enlargement and integration. A specific migrant experience is the focus of this paper: the return to whence the migrant came. The successful migrant will often obtain a greater mobility than those left behind which allows the migrant to move between different worlds. When the movement is used to visit the place left long ago it is likely to lead to experiences of changes in belonging and feelings of displacement. My analysis will concentrate on two German films thematizing the return to the former East German lands of a thriving inner-German migrant. In Die Nachrichten (Matti Geschonneck, 2005) a successful TV-presenter is suddenly faced with accusations of being a Stasi-informant. To vindicate himself he must return to his native town where he no longer fits in. In Der Preis (Elke Hauck, 2011) an architect wins a project in the East German city which he left long ago after a traumatic event. Hesitantly, he returns to experience a severe culture clash and a sense of displacement. While problematizing the difficult return of the inner-German migrant the two films thematize the German unification process with a high degree of verisimilitude As such they serve as counter points to the popular ostalgie-comedies. In both films the East German migrant has successfully arrived in the West as the dominant West German discourse coined it. But for various reasons the migrants are required to return to the East and revisit what was once their home. Numerous German films have problematized how the East German past and the unification process have troubled Germany today, but few have captured the inner-German migrants dilemma as convincingly as the two films analysed in this paper. Thus, I argue that the films address cultural experiences rarely addressed in post-unification cinema, and experiences which mirror larger European phenomena.
Sune Bechmann Pedersen is PhD-candidate at the Department of History at Lund University. He specializes in contemporary Central and Eastern European film culture, but works also with broader aspects of history and memory in Europe since WWI. His four year doctoral research project on Czech and German post-communist cinema is part of the international research project "Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region" undertaken in cooperation by the universities in Lund, Greifswald and Tartu. His most recent publication is "Treading New Paths: Czech and German Post-communist Road Movies" in Kristensen, Lars Lyngsgaard Fjord (ed). Post-Communist Film in Russia and Eastern Europe: Moving Images of PostCommunism. Routledge. 2011. Email: SUNE.BECHMANN_PEDERSEN@HIST.LU.SE

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JUSTYNA BEINEKIndiana University, Bloomington, USA Here the Toilets Are Cleaner Than Our Baptismal Fonts: The West in Polish Film Before and After 1989 This paper traces the trajectory of constructing a Poles encounter with the West in Polish film twenty or so years before 1989 and after 1989 (the 1970s-present); the main question of this inquiry is evaluating the impact of the fall of communism on the changing attitudes about the West as a cultural construct. The Pole in question is often an migr Pole, sometimes an aspiring migr, and at times a Polish tourist who meets migr Poles abroad or in Poland. This trajectory starts with two comedies: Chciskis Kochaj albo rzu (1977) and Barejas Mi (1981), in which the West is domesticated/tamed by humor. Hollands film Kobieta samotna (1981, released 1989) and Dejczers 300 mil do nieba (1989) are symptomatic of the change in the cinematic paradigm of the West, which was brought about by the fall of communism and of the institution of censorship: directors turn to high-pitched drama to show the desperate flight of Poles the poorest and most disadvantaged ones to the imagined, mythologized, either inaccessible or almost hermetically sealed, paradise that can be accessed only by superhuman, extreme efforts. After 1989, the construction of the West is carried out through the migr narrative. Kielowskis White (1994) and Zaorskis Szczliwego Nowego Jorku (1997) are two examples of this narrative, which is steeped in two main discourses: that of inferiority/superiority and that of the West functioning as an object of desire for Polish immigrants. This paradigm is at times slightly altered by, for example, introducing the plot of revenge, or it can be shown in new decorations, for instance, of wild capitalism of the early 1990s , yet the basic attitude toward the West remains the same monolith captured by Mroek back in the late 1960s and 1970s. The myth of the West in Polish culture seems to be so strong that it erases geographical differences even in the cinema of the 1990s. Mroeks reduction of the Polish migrs to XX and AA living in an unnamed, yet superior to Poland, Western location (presumably Paris) best encapsulates perhaps an abstract, set in stone, infinite, that is, an almost absolute relation between Polish culture and its solidly constructed Other the West. It is only the most recent Polish cinema and literature that attempt to undermine this construct: e.g. Szumowskas film 33 sceny z ycia (2008) shows the West as a normalized referent, a cultural space in which Polish artists, musicians, and writers not migrs anymore can freely function as equals, whereas Stasiuks play Noc (2004) ridicules the fossilized dichotomy of East and West, and his travelogue Dojczland (2007) probes the Polish-German relations from the viewpoint of an East European writer not a Gastarbeiter whose project is to see and describe the West without genuflection.
Justyna Beinek (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, where she directs the Polish Language, Literature, and Culture Program. Her areas of interest include Polish, Russian, and comparative literature, Romanticism, post-communist culture, and film. More specifically, Beineks research has focused on topics such as representations of the body in cultural texts, the phenomenon of imagined geographies, and the idea of The West in Slavic cultures, as well as issues of national and gender identity, memory, and authorship. Beineks monograph Portable Graveyards: Russian and Polish Albums in the Age of Romanticism is forthcoming. Her co-edited volume of essays titled Re-mapping Polish-German Memory: Geographical, Cultural, and Political Space since World War II, is slated for publication in fall 2011. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Pushkin Review, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, Sarmatian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Postscriptum Polonistyczne, Roczniki Humanistyczne, and other journals. Email: JBEINEK@YAHOO.COM

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KLARA BRUVERISUniversity of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Defiance, Desire, Despair: Those Who Are Left Behind Get in the van, in the van! A psychotic teenager forces four naked German men at gunpoint into a meat truck/ I dont want to do this, butfuck, Ive got no choice! A young man beats up a drug dealer; he needs to get to Amsterdam/ So theres nothing keeping you here, huh?! A deteriorating relationship, the idea of losing a partner to migration is simply too much. Analysis of transnational cinema tends to focus on the migrants experience, the experience of leaving the familiar behind, in constant search of home, an idea, as Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden argue, that is a constant object of desire in the migrants reality driving his or her being. The film characters are therefore characterised in Hamid Naficys formulation as lonely, struggling with emotional conflict and psychological adjustment. However, I would like to ask, what about those who are left behind? What kinds of film characters form from the experience of witnessing migration but not experiencing it for oneself? Furthermore, does one have to migrate to feel displaced from their homeland? The key area of transnational cinema studies that is addressed in this paper is the interrelationships between the local, national and the global. Engaging in what Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim call a concrete-specific approach, this paper will examine how contemporary Latvian social realist films have begun to depict characters with fluctuating identities, who feel displaced from their home without migrating. Applying Naficys theoretical framework on accented cinemas, it will be argued that these films show a process of becoming, usually found in what Naficy calls postcolonial and ethnic films. The focus will be on the use of tactile optics, themes and visual fetishes of the homeland, exploring how these films express a desire to find a past home that has been lost due to Soviet colonialism and Latvias recent admission into the European Union. Particular attention will be paid to the films of Juris Poskus, Monotony (2007) and Death To You (2010), however other films will be examined to gain a broader understanding of the contemporary Latvian film landscape, including The Dark Deer (Kairiss, 2006), and The Amateur (Nords, 2008).
Klara Bruveris is currently preparing a PhD in film studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Email: K.BRUVERIS@STUDENT.UNSW.EDU.AU

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IPEK A. CELIKBrown University, Providence, USA Beyond Criminal and Victim: The Migrant in European Genre Cinema This paper explores violent imaginings of migrants and minorities in contemporary European cinema. Victims of human trafficking, terrorists, fundamentalist Muslimsthese images have currency in media representations of migrants and minorities of migrant heritage in Europe. The public visibility of these populations is inflected by concerns of security, humanitarian crises, and failed integration. I examine the ways in which European directors address key historical events. How does Alfonso Cuarn adapt Children of Men (2006) after the al-Qaeda terror bombing in Britain? Is it a coincidence that Michael Hanekes psychological thriller Hidden (2005) premiered just before the French riots in the banlieues? What was the reception of Fatih Akins Head On (2004) in the context of minority honor killings in Germany? Why were there demonstrations against Constantinos Giannariss Hostage (2004), a film on the 1999 bus hijacking by an Albanian migrant in Greece? I argue that these filmmakers rewrite the assumed relationship between minorities and violence. They undermine the singularity of violent event and provide ways of understanding the role of violence in everyday life. The paper has a two-fold focus. First, it examines how European cinema unfolds the notion of violent event by reflecting on its historical, economic and geographical complexities. Second, the paper explores the directors use of genreranging from science fiction to thriller and melodramato avoid the framing of their films on minorities as ethnographies. The questions that occupy this project are: Can there be a narrative style that forces the violent event to lose its singularity? When filming minorities and real events that involve these communities, can European cinema go beyond social realism? I suggest that, the above directors application of genres from drama/ tragedy, thriller, melodrama, to science fiction shift the focus from the ethnographic gaze to the presentation of structural complexities of the event and of the minority characters. Use of genre subverts the demands of a socially aware art film audience and the politics of desire in spectatorship of violence: the desire to know the migrant Other as much as the desire to watch the threatening and suffering Others. This paper underlines the need to go beyond Bazinian realism for politically progressive filmmaking today and argues for the necessity to explore the potentials of genre cinema.
Ipek Celik is a Visiting Assistant Professor in comparative literature at Brown University (Providence, USA). Her research explores representation of migrants and minorities in contemporary European film and literature. Ipeks recent and forthcoming publications include I Wanted You to be Present: Guilt and History of Violence in Michael Hanekes Hidden, in Cinema Journal (Fall 2010) and Internal Borders in Yorgos Lanthimoss Dogtooth (Kynodontas-2009) in Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010 (Intellect, 2012). Email: IPEK_CELIK@ BROWN.EDU

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ALYSSA DEBLASIODickinson College, Carlisle, USA

Roming: Nomadism in Czech and Slovak Cinema after 1989 This paper addresses representations of Roma communities in contemporary Czech and Slovak cinema: specifically, the foregrounding of Roma mythology in Ji Vejdleks Slovak, Czech, and Romanian co-production Roming (2007). Roming, which itself is transnational in the sense that it is the product of three national film industries, addresses the cultural, political, and ethnic stereotypes often associated with Roma nomadism (both internally and externally). It emphasizes and exaggerates the migratory patterns of ethnic minorities living in the post-1989 Czech and Slovak Republics, as well as the flexible borders (e.g. geographical, artistic, and mythological) of the region. This paper begins by looking at the structure and critical reception of the film. It concludes by tracing the ways that Roming is a cinematic response to the legal nomadism that followed the post-1989 adjustment and, in some cases, abolishment of mandatory education, registration, and employment requirements for Roma populations. Roming works to demystify the cinematic clichs that have become attached to Roma culture: first, by emphasizing migration as an identity and not a side effect; second, by treating widely held clichs as a stage for humor and reflection rather than grounds for nationalism.
Alyssa DeBlasio is Assistant Professor and Chair of Russian at Dickinson College (Pennsylvania, USA). She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and has also taught in the Department of Philosophy at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). Her articles on Russo-Soviet cinema and contemporary Russian philosophy have appeared in Russian Review, Studies in East European Thought, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Kinokultura, and Epistemologiia i filosofiia nauki, among others. Presently, her research is divided along two trajectories: Russo-Soviet literary and cinematic representations of Soviet-era philosophy; and Slovak filmmaking since 1989. Email: DEBLASIA@DICKINSON.EDU

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HELGA DRUXESWilliams College, Williamstown, USA The Panic over Motherhood: Transnational Labor Migrants in Films by Ciulei, Kougashvili and Haneke The Latin-American sociologist Laura Mara Agustn has argued that [w]hen [migrant] women decide to travel, commentators search for reasons, leaving little room for desire, aspiration, anxiety or other states of the soul. In contrast, first-world travelers are imagined to be modern individuals searching for ways to realize themselves. (Agustn, Sex at the Margins, 2007, 19). Two recent documentaries and one feature from 2000 draw attention to the fact that the female transnational labor migrant exemplifies two added dimensions of the moral panic surrounding the transnational worker: on the one hand, her mobility and her remittances call into question her passive victim status; on the other hand, she becomes the catalyst for normative ideas about the family, motherhood, and globalized labor. The Romanian director Thomas Ciuleis The Flower Bridge (2008), Georgian filmmaker Levan Kougashvilis Women from Georgia (2009), and Austrian director Michael Hanekes Code inconnu (2000) portray the ways in which the female labor migrant from Eastern Europe has altered constructions of family and the globalized underclass. This paper addresses the moral panic over reconfigured gender roles and the domestic labor performed by a migrant underclass often denigrated as an expendable resource. Global anxieties over shifts in the labor market, changing demographics and unstable border zones between East and West are projected onto the body of the female labor migrant. Using feminist and post-colonial theory ranging from Kristeva to Gullestad and Agustn, I investigate the crisis of values implied by these three male filmmakers.
Helga Druxes received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1987 and is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams. Her current research includes contemporary narratives of labor migration, Herta Mller's novels, and Germany's 'Autonomous Nationalists', a new group of radical Neo-Nazis. Publications include: Female Body Traffic in Ulrich Seidls Film Import/Export and Ursula Biemanns Remote Sensing and Europlex, special issue: Globalization, Literature, Film and the New Economy, Seminar, 47, 2011. "The Migrants Body: Publicity and the Abject in Contemporary Documentaries" (International Journal of the Humanities, forthcoming) and Remembering as Revision: Fictionalizing Nazism in Postwar Germany," Modern Language Studies (Fall 1994), and two books: Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women Writers, (Wayne State University Press, 1996) and The Feminization of Dr. Faustus: Female Identity Quests from Stendhal to Morgner, (University Park: Penn State Press, 1993). Email: HELGA.DRUXES@WILLIAMS.EDU

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PETRA HANKOVCharles University in Prague, Czech Republic There is No Place Like Home: Czech Postcommunist Cinema and the Refusal to be Transnational The 1994 Czech film Jzda (The Ride, directed by Jan Svrk) is structured like a standard road movie the protagonists set out on a road trip that takes them away from their everyday existence, their journey being both a literal traveling and a trip of their imagination. But this Eastern/Central European road movie has an unexpected twist to it as the main characters travel in an unregistered car (most probably stolen and smuggled from the West), they are well aware that their journey is limited by borders and necessarily contained within the confines of the country and restricted to side roads. Crossing the frontiers of the small locale here becomes impossible, dangerous but above all, it is not really longed for. The central characters are perfectly happy with the confinement, as they do not represent the sense of homelessness and uprooting of modern mankind (which is so often typical of road movie characters), but a specific, untroubled hominess and a sense of belonging to a country, its culture, and tradition. Jzda, in many ways, reflects the unwillingness of the Czech postcommunist cinema to cross the borders, its particular satisfaction and pride derived from staying home and safe, and a specific refusal to acknowledge the last twenty years as a period of intense migrations and transnational political, cultural and social formation. This presentation will look at the distinct tendency of Czech film industry to stay home both geographically and thematically, and also in terms of certain aesthetic and stylistic models. This resistance and distrust of foreign places and influences (but also of foreigners) has been a staple presence in the history of Czech (Czechoslovak) cinema throughout its history. The current refusal to consider the changed geopolitical terrain of Europe with both the possibilities and dangers that it holds out is mirrored in a stubborn parochialism, asserting film as a national product and an expression of certain cultural isolationist tradition dating back to the establishment of the modern Czech nation in the 19th century. The talk will explore the historical and cultural reasons of this phenomenon and its specific reflection in the current writing on Czech cinema
Petra Hankov is assistant professor at the Film Studies Department of the Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the theory of film and visual culture, gender analysis and the representation of national identity in film. She is the author of Pandoina sknka aneb Co feministky provedly filmu? [Pandora's Box or What Have Feminists Done to Cinema?, 2007], editor of Vzva perspektivy. Obraz a jeho divk od malby quattrocenta k filmu a zpt [The Challenge of Perspective. Image and its Spectator from Quattrocento Panting to Film and Back, 2008], and the co-editor of Visegrad Cinema: Points of Contact from the New Waves to the Present (2010, with Kevin Johnson). She is currently working on a book on national imaging in Czech visual culture. Email: ENERGEIAPH@GMAIL.COM

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DINA IORDANOVAUniversity of St Andrews, Scotland Traffic Trajectories: Poverty, Post Communism, and Cinematic Representation The current crisis of the Eurozone has finally made it possible to openly name the serious economic problems that have been brewing in the context of post-communist accession to Europe. While many aspects of poverty-driven migrations have extensively featured in cinema, there has been lesser recognition in the context of media, and even lesser presence in the context of pan-European public discourse. In such context, cinema becomes particularly important as it seems to take the lead in naming issues that remain shunned by politicians. Directors such as Zeilmir Zilnik (Serbia) and Lukas Moodysson (Sweden) have put on the agenda of European forced migrations more forcefully than mainstream media have managed to do. Film Festivals and one-off events such as exhibitions and workshops focusing on matters of economic migrations, human traffic, bondage and slavery, as well as other forms of exploitation and abuse, have proliferated in recent years, showcasing a growing critical mass of politically engaged works on the topic. The talk will explore various aspects of human trafficking as seen in recent European cinema. It will suggest ways in which narrative art and cinematic representation could become more influential in shaping the media agenda and the public discourse that underpins it.
Dina Iordanova is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she is currently serving as Provost. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Trustee of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She has had visiting positions at Universities in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. Iordanova is the author of books related to matters of Eastern European and Balkan cinema (e.g. Cinema of Flames, 2001; Cinema of the Other Europe, 2003, among others) and co-author of a book about human trafficking in cinema (Moving People, Moving Images, 2010). In recent years, she has been working primarily on matters related to the dynamics of world cinema and has established a series of publications dedicated to international film festivals (The Festival Circuit, 2009; Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, 2010; Film Festivals and East Asia, 2011). Forthcoming projects include Film Festivals and Activism (2012) and Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves Online (2012), co-edited respectively with Leshu Torchin and Stuart Cunningham. Email: DINA.IORDANOVA@ST-ANDREWS.AC.UK

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JULIA KOSTOVA Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA Self-Representation in Recent Bulgarian Cinema Contemporary Bulgarian cinema has received relatively little scholarly attention, especially in comparison to Romanian New Wave cinema or Central European films. Discussions about the transformation of post-communist national cinema largely exclude Bulgarian cinema as a case study despite its specificities and the growing recognition of its merits. This can be partly explained by the decrease in cinematic production following the withdrawal of state funding for national cinema in Bulgaria and the increasingly difficult economic conditions which have prevented many experienced and new filmmakers from raising funds. Other explanations have included limited access to international competitions and structures intended to increase visibility, and low interest in European/international audiences, among others. I would like to suggest that the low visibility of Bulgarian cinema corresponds to the way new Bulgarian cinema explores diegetically its (self-) assigned position within Europe and the world post-1989. The question of migration treated in recent Bulgarian films in fact lends itself to a study of the question of self-representation, particularly in relationship to Europe. I propose to look at recent films such as Tilt (2011), Mission London (2010), Emigrants (2002) and Seamstresses (2007) through the theoretical framework of migration to show how recent Bulgarian cinema repeatedly thwarts attempts to construct a European identity, dismissing transnationalism as a valid mode of integration in favor of the classic mode of exile/diaspora/emigration. Thus, it perpetrates a myth of victimhood. My presentation will include video excerpts and subtitles from all of the films referenced, and excerpts from interviews with the directors of Tilt and Emigrants.
Julia Kostova holds a Ph.D. in French. She is currently working on a project on the creation of consumer culture in Bulgaria post-1989 and on the poetry of Bulgarian-Turkish authors. She is the founder of TransIzdat Press, a publishing house whose mission it is to introduce literature in translation from traditionally underrepresented regions of the world to the US market. She lives and works in New York City. Email: JKOSTOVA@YAHOO.COM

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JAKOB LADEGAARDAarhus University, Denmark Framing Eastern European Women: The Politics of Representation in Ulrich Seidls Import Export Austrian director Ulrich Seidls second fiction film, Import Export (2007), tells the parallel stories of Olga, a Ukrainian nurse going to Austria to work, and Paul, an unemployed security guard living in a Vienna suburb, who travels Eastward for the same reason. The plot lines never cross on the level of narrative, but on a thematic level they both contribute to the films main concern: the depiction of the power structures seemingly involved in all social interaction, not least in the relation between Western European male subjects and Eastern European women. Seidls treatment of this topic is direct and graphic. The film abounds with disturbing, prolonged scenes of psychic and physical humiliation and violence. Characteristic of Seidls distanced, semi-documentary style, these scenes are presented in a detached, impersonal manner with long takes, minimal camera movement and few close-ups. As a result, the surroundings framing the action often attract independent attention from the viewer. In this way, the emotional identification with the subdued common in many filmic representations of similar issues is made difficult. Some critics have rejected this style as cynical and amoral. But this paper argues to the contrary that it is deeply ethical in the sense that it does not only portray oppression, but also in a highly self-conscious way raises uncomfortable questions about the power relations involved in critical and filmic representations of the oppressed that are glossed over by the familiar logic of moral outrage and victimization. This is achieved mainly by allowing the viewer an ambivalent identification with Seidls camera as a point of view. On the one hand its disenchanted gaze and the function of its framing are reminiscent of the traditional gaze of ideology critique that seeks to expose the suffering of the oppressed while at the same time emphasizing its material and ideological background. The viewer is thus invited to perform the traditional analytical task of the social film critic along with the socially engaged director. On the other hand, however, the critical, analytical gaze that exposes the humiliation of Eastern European women is hard to distinguish from the cynic, sadistic gaze of the Western males that take pleasure in staging and directing the very same exposure in the films narrative universe. The film thus suggests an analogy between the social power relations portrayed in the film and a certain filmic and critical way of representing the oppressed. However, the paper argues, the films double critique of both the logic of emotional identification and the explanatory framing of ideology critique, makes room for a portrayal of emancipatory empowerment in the figure of Olga, who refuses to conform to the roles offered to her by society and its disenchanted critics.
Jakob Ladegaard, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark. Areas of interest include the relations between modern literature, film, political theory and history. His current research project concerns representations of Eastern European political spaces in contemporary Western film and literature. Recent publications include Confronting Universalities Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation (Ed. With Mads Anders Baggesgaard). Aarhus University Press, 2011, and The Castle in Transylvania Gothic Spaces between East and West in Bram Stokers Dracula and Franz Kafkas The Castle (in Danish), Passage, Nr. 66, 2011. Email: LITJL@HUM.AU.DK

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MASSIMO LOCATELLI Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy FRANCESCO PITASSIO Universit degli Studi di Udine, Italy Vesna Goes Faster. Eastern European Actresses and Contemporary Italian Cinema Aim of this paper is to investigate a widespread commonplace of contemporary Italian film and television fiction: the young Eastern European beauty. Trivializing the social challenges posed by significant immigration rates from Eastern European countries in the last 20 years, Italian national cinema insisted from the early Nineties on (at least starting from Carlo Mazzacurati's Un'altra vita Another Life, 1992) on a ready-made narrative formula, clearly indebted to melodramatic structures: a beautiful girl, in search of a better destiny, is lead to poverty and/or prostitution and forced to sacrifice her moral virtues, but meets and loves a pitifully Italian middle-class guy who redeems her and unveils her morality, and is subsequently convinced to fight for her own freedom. In all evidence, a typical male idealization, that has been since then repeated in many television productions. The actual experience of migration is obliterated and substituted with stereotypes where any national or ethnic, cultural or professional, gender or generational identity is reduced to a simple female character, and which could be interpreted, like most Italian critics do, as a pop cultural mean to come to terms with social and historical traumas; but that most probably only show the symbolic inability of the national culture to reflect upon contemporary social processes and foresee the future, neutralizing for the wider national audience the actual reality of migration in form of a dream of love and redemption. Our discussion will stress the main narrative structures which the young-EasternEuropean-beauty character is based on, i.e. in the case of Vesna (Teresa Zajickova), the young Czech leading figure of Mazzacurati's Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast, 1996), as well as the recurring physiognomy of the actresses chosen for these roles: mostly, the northern Slavic traits of Russian, Polish or Czech protagonists. But we will also consider the permanent presence in Cinecitt of well trained and skilled talents, as some of them started widely acknowledged careers, well beyond such a stereotyped casting, as in the case of Kasia Smutniak, Ksenija Rapoport or Barbora Bobulova. What strikes in this case is often the combination of quite simplistic narratives and characters, enriched and improved by the performative contribution offered by highly professional and dramatic skills, often lacking in Italian performers. Will these professional skills of Eastern European performers sustain the old, trembling Italian cinema, as half a million of Ukrainian caregivers do it with as many retired Italian moviegoers...?
Massimo Locatelli is an Assistant Professor at the Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. His main research areas are on the one side the history of film theory and on the other side a social and technological history of Italian cinema. He has always been interested in questions of cultural identity, focusing on various themes from German and Italian national cinemas (including the former GDR). Since 2003 he is the editor of two main Italian film and media reviews, Bianco e Nero and Comunicazioni Sociali. His recent publications include: Figure della modernit nel cinema italiano (1900-1940), Pisa 2008 (co-edited with Raffaele De Berti), and Microteorie: cinema muto tedesco, special issue of Bianco e Nero, 556-2006 (co-edited with Leonardo Quaresima). Email: MASSIMO.LOCATELLI@UNICATT.IT Francesco Pitassio (Perugia, 1968) is Film Studies associate professor at the Universit degli Studi di Udine. He published contributions in international film journals (Cinegrafie, Bianco e Nero, CINMAS, Montage/AV, Archivos de la Filmoteca, Iluminace). Since 1997 he is a member of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Film Studies of Udine. Since 2002, he is a member of the scientific board of MAGIS Gradisca Film Studies Spring School. He is member of the Publication Committee of NECS European Network for Cinema and Media Studies. He

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coordinates the editorial staff of CINMA & Cie. He edited with Leonardo Quaresima Scrittura e immagine/Writing and Image (Udine, 1998) and Versions Multiples III/Multiple-language Versions III (Milano, 2005), with Alessandro Faccioli Bianco & Nero, Sergio Tofano. Il cinema a merenda (Roma, 2005), with Cristiano Diddi La caccia alle farfalle. Crisi e rinascita delle cinematografie dei paesi slavi (Salerno 2010). Among his essays are Ombre silenziose. Teoria dell'attore cinematografico negli anni Venti (Udine, 2002), Maschere e marionette. Il cinema ceco e dintorni (Udine, 2002) and Attore/Divo (Milano, 2003), Il neorealismo cinematografico, with Paolo Noto (Bologna, 2010). Email: FRANCESCO.PITASSIO@UNIUD.IT

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Ewa MazierskaUniversity of Central Lancashire, UK Work and Mobility in Eastern European Cinema from the 1960s till Now The bulk of studies about representation of mobility in Eastern European cinema are focused on foreign migration in the postcommunist period. This phenomenon cannot be neglected in the light of the fact that many Eastern Europeans left their countries after communism collapsed, taking advantage of the easing of travel and working restrictions. For example, the British Office for National Statistics estimates that between December 2003 and June 2009 the Polish-born population of the UK increased from 75,000 to 503,000. Polish people are the largest non-British group in Scotland and Wales, the second largest in Northern Ireland and either the second and third largest in each of the English regions. London alone, according to the same Office for National Statistics, has 113,000 Polish-born migrants. Cinema, on both sides of the host-guest divide, represents this phenomenon, examples are films such as Ode to Joy (2005), directed by Kazejak-Dawid, Jan Komasa and Maciej Migas and Shane Meadows Somers Town (2008). In my talk, however, I would like to locate the films about migration in a wider context of the representation of work in Eastern European cinema, beginning with films made in the 1960s. My argument is that work and mobility are intertwined in this cinema, reflecting the real migrations of the inhabitants of this region, caused by the development of industry, and the ideological stance of filmmakers, who used the motif of mobility to comment on the situation and identities of workers at large. I will discuss the shifts in representation, beginning with Walkover (1965), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, A Blonde in Love (1965), directed by Milos Forman and Man Is not a Bird (1965), directed by Dusan Makavejev, through Top Dog (1978), directed by Feliks Falk, Solo Sunny (1980), directed by Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase, A Woman Alone (1981), directed by Agnieszka Holland, Moonlighting (1982), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski to Spare Parts (2003), directed by Damjan Kozole and Ode to Joy. I will look at the chosen films in the context of the shift from state socialism to postcommunism/neoliberalism. My main theoretical tools will be the concept of biopolitics, introduced by Michel Foucault and developed by Giorgio Agamben. I will also draw on gender studies.
Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Contemporary Cinema, School of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Central Lancashire. She published over ten monographs and edited collections, including European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and with Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: The European Road Movie (Wallflower Press, 2006). Email: EHMAZIERSKA@UCLAN.AC.UK

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ALEXANDAR MIHAILOVICHofstra University, Hempstead, USA Desensitized Migrants: Organized Crime in Cronenbergs Eastern Promises and Balabanovs Boiler Room Attendant Two recent cinematic representations of migrants from Russia and Siberia have foregrounded their involvement in organized crime, and the desensitization that results from it. The protagonists of David Cronenbergs Eastern Promises (2007) and Aleksei Balabanovs Boiler Room Attendant (2010) lack what Elaine Scarry terms object awareness. Scarry asserts that the awareness of objects represents a crucial conceptual lever for understanding the pain of others. Insofar as an object is a nexus for human projections, it is a paradigm for the notion of an artifact with a particular use, role, and therefore identity. She goes on to argue that our reflexive and largely subconscious tendency to perceive the world of objects in animistic terms is in fact an important stepping stone for coming to an awareness of the otherness of fellow human beings, of apprehending their sentience and status as entities that are no less autonomous than ourselves. The films Eastern Promises and Boiler Room Attendant portray desensitization to the pain of others as occurring as the result of a crippling of the object awareness that Scarry describes. One point that Scarry makes is that Marxs own critique of animism and commodity fetishism in Das Capital is informed by tak[ing] the apparent aliveness [of commodities] as a basis for the actual aliveness of the human source of that projected attribute. In their films, Cronenberg and Balabanov depict migrants who are oddly ascetic, and who operate in a world of objects that obtains meaning only when it is violated. This ethic of seeing other people and things as an inert mass prior to a forceful touch is a defining character trait for Cronenbergs Nikolai and Balabanovs Yakut. In both films, the viewer is also made to understand that this self-numbing is also essential to the transformation of the migrant to a murderer, and the murderer into an employee. The subsequent stage of this evolutionwhich is reached only by a fewis understood as a volatile synthesis of the lone criminals penchant for violence and the highly corporate organizational skills of the leader of a criminal collective. Cronenberg and Balabanov set for themselves the task of demythologizing the image of what the historian E. H. Hobsbawm terms the social bandit, the archetype of the unaffiliated or anarchistic criminal. Like Roberto Saviano, Cronenberg in particular views organized crime workers in Europe as subject to the same pressures as their undocumented migrant counterparts in the world of legitimate business. The directors present the assassins psychic numbing as a mark of assimilation into the precariate, the anonymous and frankly exploitive collective of provisional labor.
Alexandar Mihailovic is professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University. Author of Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtins Theology of Discourse (1997) and of articles on 19thand 20th century Russian and Ukrainian literature and cultural relations during the Cold War. He has translated Russian literature and literary criticism. Queer and gender studies publications include: Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centenary Symposium (1999) and In the Heat of the Boiler Room: The Subculture of the Russian Navy in the Work of the St. Petersburg Mitki. World Literature Today 80:2 (July 2006): 50-57; Exotic Diversity: The New Russian Consumerism and the Bisexual Triangle in Olga Stolpovskayas Film You I Love in Queer Exoticism, ed. David A. Powell and Tamara Powell (2010), 62-77; Wings of a Dove: The Shifting Language for Same-Sex Desire in Medvedevs Russia in Sexual Identities, ed. David A. Powell and Judith Kaufmann. [forthcoming, 2012]. Articles on transmigration include Exotic Diversity: The New Russian Consumerism and the Bisexual Triangle in Olga Stolpovskayas Film You I Love and Globalist Gangsters: Reading Mexican Drug Cartels and Russian Organized Crime. The International Journal of the Humanities. [forthcoming]. Email: ALEXANDER.MIHAILOVIC@HOFSTRA.EDU

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ANNA MROZEWICZUniversity of Copenhagen, Denmark Returning to the Unknown Place of Origin: Postmemory, Subjectivity and Narrative Strategies in the Documentary Films by Kofler (2004) and Dammas (2007) The subject of the so-called Polish March 1968 and the subsequent emigration of almost twenty thousand Polish citizens with Jewish background, around three thousand of which chose Denmark as their destination, has only recently received attention of Danish filmmakers. It is not just due to a coincidence that two short documentaries relating to the problem Koflers Statsls (Stateless), 2004 and Dammas Kredens (Dresser), 2007 were made within a relatively short period of time. Both directors have Polish-Jewish origins and are children of the post-1968 emigrants from the communist Poland, both born and brought up in Denmark, and around thirty years old when making their films. They both represent the second generation in relation to those who experienced the traumatic events of going into exile, losing their Polish citizenship without possibility of returning to their home country. Re-telling the history of Europe-as-a-whole across the old borderlines is, as Thomas Mohnike (2007) argues, one of the typical elements in the post-1989 re-imagining of the new Europe. The two films I discuss are a special case, however, as they (re)tell personal stories existing not in the authors memory, but postmemory, which is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection (Marianne Hirsch, 1997) or, as Ernst van Alphen (2006) puts it, memory which lacks indexical connectedness. In their creative processes of (re)telling the (hi)story, the two directors reflect on the consequences of their parents exile on their own identities and their current locations in the (home/host) society. Even though the two films tell apparently the same story and both are structured around the idea of returning to and exploring family places in the cities of the parents origin (Warszawa and Wrocaw), they are radically different from each other, representing two distinct subjectivities and modes of experiencing and narrating the family past and the directors own present feelings of displacement or belonging. Dammas documentary reveals a liminal, hybrid and suspended subjectivity and an interstitial location, i.e. neither Polish, Danish nor Jewish, but oscillating somewhere in between. Kofler, on the other hand, was brought up by his father to be 100% Danish and even more. Dammas perspective is a real transnational one, while Koflers is international. Dammas experimental mode of filmmaking could be called with Hamid Naficy (2001) accented cinema (also literally, Dammas speaking Polish with Danish accent), while Koflers film is both formally and in terms of content a clear-cut, well-structured piece with unambiguous cultural and national divisions. Dammas film not just tells about, but incarnates postmemory and the inseparability of the present and past, while Kofler is striving for objectivity and a well-defined structure. Both films, however, are equally important voices (heard also in literature) of the post1989 transnational dynamics understood not only as a physical mobility, but first of all as a process triggering reformulations of the old narratives and questioning the idea of a nationbased identity. Compared with each other, Dammas and Koflers documentaries reveal different modes and attitudes towards these central questions.
Anna Mrozewicz (1980) assistant professor at the Department of Film, Television and New Media at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna, Poland. Currently postdoc at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, working on a project about representations of Eastern Europe in Danish and Scandinavian film, literature and visual arts. She has recently written articles on postmemory in Danish literature and documentary films about the so called Polish March 1968. Author of the book Traces of Ekphrasis. Contemporary Danish Writers in Relation to Visual Arts (Poznan 2010). Email: ANNAM@HUM.KU.DK

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DORU POPBabes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania Being and Seeing Foreigners in Contemporary Romanian Cinema Over the past two decades more than two million Romanians have left their country in order to find work in countries like Italy or Spain. The experiences of almost 10% of the population of Romania were rarely a part of the mainstream culture and their representation was limited to only a few movies and novels. Mostly these experiences were part of the media frenzy about immigrants and their identity, describing them in a very schematic and sometimes biased way. This paper is based on comparing the cinematic representations of foreign workers both from the perspective of those who emigrate and from the perspective of those who transit Romania toward the West. The interpretation is based on three movies. The first, made by Marian Crisan (Morgen, the Special Prize of the Jury at Locarno Film Festival), is concentrating on the relationship between a Turkish emigrant trying to reach Germany and a Romanian who is helping him to illegally cross the border. The second movie is Francesca (Francesca is the Catholic saint of immigrants), directed by Bobby Punescu and based on a real event, the case of a woman who was raped in Italy and the wave of aggressive attacks against immigrants. The third movie discussed is Mircea Daneliuc's production Cele ce plutesc (Those Who Float) which is also is based on a story about Romanian emigrants in Italy. The paper analyses both movies from the pre-1989 directors (like Danielicu) and the young generation of directors (Crisan and Paunescu) and tries to find the roots of the relationship with emigrants and immigrants from a Romanian point of view.
Doru Pop is Associate Professor at Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. Bachelor of Arts, Faculty of Letters, Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj (1994), Fulbright research scholar, New School for Social Research in New York (1995-1996), Master of Arts, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (2003), PhD at the Faculty of History, Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj (2004). Lecturer at the Faculty of Political Sciences, the Journalism Department, Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj (1997-2001). From 2004, PhD Lecturer, then Associate Professor at the Faculty of Theater and Television, Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj. He teaches courses in Visual Culture, Communication and Media Theory, Romanian Cinema. Author of (selectively): Social Obsessions, Institutul European Publishing House, Iasi, 1998, Media and Politics, Institutul European Publishing House, Iasi, 1999, 911. The Day Democracy Died, Dacia Publishing House, Cluj, 2003, The Stories of Gradma Nana, Aquaforte Publishing House, Cluj, 2003, The Eye and the Body. Modern and Postmodern in the Philosophy of the Visual Culture, Dacia Publishing House, Cluj, 2005, Hell's Elections. False Treatise on the Romanian Political Imaginary, Indigo Publishing House, Cluj, 2008. Email: POPDORU@GMAIL.COM

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ANA CAROLINA BENTO RIBEIRO Universit Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, France The Way Back: Images of Returning Migrants in Contemporary Romanian Cinema In the context of a country that recently integrated the so-called newEurope, migration tends to be more and more a reality. Hence, migration, be it a concrete reality or an expressed desire is a constant figure in the contemporary Romanian cinema. In its films, characters constantly express the desire to leave, mention those who are gone, idealize the former occident. If leaving is a frequent subject, those who come back, temporarily or not, are also depicted in new Romanian films. Their arrival, however, is not faced without unrest. If leaving has been seen as the natural movement, those who followed this trend and come back to the country play an important role in exposing, at least in recent films, much deeper questions concerning the Romanian mentality, be it in a personal or collective sphere. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the figure of returning migrants, exploring its narrative functions in two recent Romanian films, Florin Serbans If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle and Radu Munteans Boogie and confronting them to Romanias current social, political and economical situation. In these films, we have temporary visitors, returning to a homeland with which they have a dubious relation. Exploring a framework where themes as globalization and contemporary diasporas play a major role, we will analyze the disturbance these migrants cause in the environment and psyche of those who stayed.
After obtaining a Masters degree at the University of Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, with a dissertation on the economy of the Romanian New Wave, Ana Ribeiro is a PhD candidate at the University of Paris 10, Nanterre-La Dfense where she researches the representation of history in contemporary Romanian fiction films. She is also a literary translator and a journalist for the website East European Film Bulletin. Email: ACBENTORIBEIRO@HOTMAIL.COM

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JOANNA RYDZEWSKAUniversity of Swansea, UK Ambiguity and Change: Transnational Encounters with Polishness in Contemporary British Cinema The 2004 extension of the European Union saw an influx of Polish migrant workers on a scale never before experienced in the United Kingdom. The British Office for National Statistics estimates that between December 2003 and June 2009 the Polish-born population of the UK increased from 75,000 to 503,000 (Office for National Statistics). The above-mentioned statistics are certainly a contextual background for two films, Shane Meadows Somers Town and Steven Sheils Mum and Dad, both released in 2008, only a year after the largest entry of Polish migrants into the UK. Somers Town portrays a runaway British teenager from the Midlands to London, Tomo, and a young Polish photographer, Marek, whose father is a guest-worker at a Kings Cross reconstruction site. Mum and Dad is a horror film whose location is a house near Heathrow Airport where a Polish girl guest worker, Lena, ends up after her last bus is gone. As the history of British cinema can claim no more than perhaps a handful of Polish main characters, often subsumed under the Eastern European label, two main Polish protagonists in a year not only look like a crowd but can also be comfortably related to the political and social situation of the enlargement of the EU in 2004. The following paper aims to analyze Shane Meadows film Somers Town and Steven Sheils Mum and Dad in the context of the representation of Polishness to show how they rework and negotiate collective feelings linked to important aspects of the changing population make-up of the UK. As argued, both films inscribe themselves rather accurately in the prevailing discourses on Polishness at large of which a measure of ambiguity about the influx of Polish migrants is the defining feature. However, if Somers Town is a feel-good film, which ends (it seems rather unintentionally) framing Poles as mythical and pre-modern (unless it is a positive thing), then Mum and Dad starts off on a premonitory note through its recourse to the horror genre to arrive at the conclusion that Poles are perhaps not as helpless as their immigrant status may conventionally suggest, which may hint at the actual reason for the anxiety.
Joanna Rydzewska lectures at the Department of Languages, Translation and Media, Swansea University. Her research interests focus on European cinema with emphasis on British and Eastern European cinema, transnational cinema, and feminist film theory. She has published articles in these areas and edited Representing Gender in Cultures (with E.H. Oleksy). Email: J.RYDZEWSKA@SWANSEA.AC.UK

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IRINA SOUCH University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Linguistic (Un)Intelligibility and Recontextualization of Russian Identities in Western Popular Film Descriptions of Russian cultural identity and fragmented, messy post-Soviet life, space and time are often offered in terms of riddles, unclarity and chaos. Moreover, in recent years, in Western popular culture the Russian has become a distinctive figure associated with ill manners, dishonesty and lack of scruples. Russian men are usually portrayed as gangsters, Russian women as prostitutes and the country itself as an eternal barbarian menace. This paper will specifically concentrate on the use, functions and narrative effects of the language(s) Russian characters speak in the cinematic texts produced in the West in the first decade of the 21st century. It can be noted that, due to the rapid processes of globalization of the culture industry, Western film makers nowadays frequently choose to employ native speakers for small episodes showing Russians. Such characters constitute a diagetic backdrop and, by speaking in their mother tongue or in broken English, create an illusion of authenticity. Their presence at the margins of the narrative structure usually does not interfere with the films dominant cultural discourse. However, when Russians feature as protagonists film directors apparently still prefer Western actors who consequently can be heard speaking broken Russian which in many cases becomes reduced to an incomprehensible mumble. The latter phenomenon is clearly reminiscent of the notion of barbarism that since Greek antiquity has been traditionally used to support the Western cultural superiority and to mark the natural Other of the civilized. Particular attention in the paper will be paid to David Cronenbergs thriller Eastern Promises (2007), which, in my opinion, constitutes the most remarkable case of multilingual accenting, intermingling and overlapping. Although the film revolves around the criminal practices within a Russian immigrant community in present-day London, all main characters are played by Western actors who constantly interlace their intentionally accented English with the (unintentionally?) even more accented and at times unintelligible Russian and Ukrainian. Since the film does not employ subtitles the Russian spoken phrases become absorbed by the overall linguistic flow and effectively loose their referential status creating a schizophrenic atmosphere of imminent danger and suspicion. However, the impact of this particular employment of accented speech goes beyond the genre specificity. By focusing on the characters linguistic (in)capacities the film seems to make an attempt to (re)contextualize and reframe the identity of a Russian in the insistently presented as much more civilized Western socio-cultural environment. To understand better the operations the Russian identities undergo in the film and to articulate the cultural import of their (re)contextualization I will consider the filmic material from the vantage point of the theory of translation. I will particularly engage with Philip Lewiss concept of abusive fidelity and Lawrence Venutis notion of translation as an explicitly cultural political practice and an ideologically invested labor of transformation.
Irina Souch has a background in Germanic Philology, Pedagogics and Literary Studies. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her work addresses the formation, assertion and representation of post-Soviet Russian identities through the analysis of popular television series and films. She also works as a conference interpreter and translator. Email: I.S.SOUCH@UVA.NL

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RENATA UKAITYT Lithuanian Culture Research Institute & Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Transcultural Subjectivities in the Cinematic Worlds of arnas Bartas: The Drift along a Traumatic Past This paper seeks to examine the formation of transcultural subjectivities in the cinematic works of Lithuanian auteur arnas Bartas, namely Three Days (1991), Corridor (1995), Seven Invisible Men (2005) and Eastern Drift (2010). These films will be reflected from both, geopolitical and aesthetical perspectives as each of them tackle the relationship between the traumatic past and present, local and transcultural, stillness and mobility, individual and communal in a sustained and complex way. Bartas protagonists are nomads, which trek from one place or community to another in quest of relief, freedom or adventure. Their national or cultural identity is not clearly articulated, however they could be recognized as Eastern Europeans (or citizens of a place having similar historic experience) whose homeland has always been a corridor for different nations and a temporary home or place of freedom. To use Vilm Flussers term they are like apparitions operating in Deleuzian crystaline time and any-space-whatevers. In the films of arnas Bartas the nations land is represented by the archetypical images of a bridge, corridor, harbor and home, and signifies a period of transformations and transcultural dimensions inside the society.
Renata ukaityt is associate professor of Film Studies and Creative Industries at Art History and Theory Department, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius. Since October 2010 she has been a research fellow at Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius. She has done a substantial research into institutional and aesthetical discourses of new media art of the Baltic States, which has resulted in a number of publications and conference papers. Her current research centres on Lithuanian and Baltic film, particularly on national and intercultural dimensions from the 90s to the present. She is the editor of the Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis volume entitled Baltic Cinemas After 90s: Shifting (Hi)Stories and (Id)Entities (2010) and is currently co-editing (with dr. Christopher Hales) a special issue of Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, devoted to Cross-Media Art and Culture Practices (to be published in 2012). Email: R.SUKAITYTE@LMTA.LT

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KRIS VAN HEUCKELOMK.U.Leuven, Belgium (Un)Polish(ed) Houses. European Migration Cinema and the Domestic Space While setting out to cover a series of prominent tropes and shifts that characterize the cinematic portrayal of Polish labor migrants after 1989, this paper looks into the function of domestic settings in some of the migration narratives involved. On the one hand, the prominent position of domestic spaces closely intertwines with the typical kind of jobs migrant workers from Poland tend to perform within the host society (construction work in the case of Polish males, domestic services in the case of their female counterparts). On the other hand, the recurring house motif seems to allow for a variety of metaphorical and allegorical readings, most notably in the sense that the house becomes the most direct spatial embodiment of the sociopolitical environment these migrant workers end up in. In a similar vein, the house-related labor performed by the protagonists seems to be highly indicative of the regenerative potential they represent vis--vis the ailing host society. What is more, the way the migrant characters behave within these local settings and are allowed to move between exterior and interior spaces seems to give expression to the various challenges and anxieties faced by Europe in the wake of the fall of Communism and subsequent European integration. In most cases, the ascending and progressive trajectory these newcomers follow within the domestic space marks their evolution from being useless outsiders (troublemakers) to becoming useful insiders (problem solvers). Apart from analyzing the house motif as one of the prominent tropes in post-1989 migration narratives, this paper also brings into view the close relationship between domestic settings and the shifted position of Polish migrants within the European Unions sociocultural space. As some of the most recent films seem to attest, Polish characters are gradually climbing up the social ladder within Fortress Europe, getting rid of their label of prototypical labor immigrants, whereas the empty space is taken up by immigrants from outside the Schengen zone. As such, the way these films envision the relation between migrants and domestic settings seems to point to the existence of specific ethnic hierarchies in the cinematic portrayal of immigrants from the former Soviet sphere of influence.
Kris Van Heuckelom (1976) is a professor of Polish language and literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests include contemporary Polish literature, visual culture, translation studies, and Polish-Jewish relations. His most recent book is (Un)Masking Bruno Schulz: New Combinations, Further Fragmentations, Ultimate Reintegrations (Rodopi 2009, co-edited with Dieter De Bruyn). Other books include Perspectives on Slavic Literatures (Pegasus 2005, co-edited with David Danaher) and Looking at Light Reflected by the Earth. Visuality in the Poetry of Czesaw Miosz (Polish Academy of Sciences 2004, in Polish). His recent publications on film include the articles Fear and Loving in Vienna Screening Polish Migrants in Post-1989 Austrian Film (in: Der Donauraum Cultural Changes in Central and South East Europe after 1989, Vienna 2010) and Polish (Im)Potence: Shifting Representations of Polish Labour Migration in Contemporary European Cinema (in Contemporary Polish Migrant Culture in Germany, Ireland, and the UK, eds. Joanna Rostek and Dirk Uffelmann, Frankfurt/Main 2011). He is currently preparing a book-length study on the representation of Polish migrants in contemporary European cinema. Email: KRIS@VANHEUCKELOM.BE

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