The Child as Witness: Personal and Public Memory in Russian Cinema

• In Event: Representations of Childhood in Russian and Polish Films

Abstract

This paper investigates personal and public memory in Pavel Chukhrai’s The Thief and Andrei Zviagintsev’s The Return through the perspectives of the child protagonists. It explores how these films respectively position the Stalin era and the collapse of the Soviet Union within the individual experiences of the characters, with a particular emphasis on the films’ conclusions.

Author

• Kirsten M. Rutsala, Virginia Tech