Please join us on October 28 at 6-8:30pm in the Alderson room (KU Memorial Union) for the screening of VOLCANO (2018), a Ukrainian film directed by Roman Bondarchuk. The film will be presented by Vitaly Chernetsky (SELL, KU) & Alevtina Kakhidze (CEC ArtsLink artist-in-residence at KU).  

Synopsis of Volcano 

A series of odd coincidences has left Lukas, an interpreter for an OSCE military checkpoint inspection tour, stranded near a small southern Ukrainian steppe town. With nowhere to turn, this city boy finds shelter at the home of a colorful local named Vova. With Vova as his guide, Lukas is confronted by a universe beyond his imagination, one in which life seems utterly detached from any identifiable structure. Fascinated by his host and his host's daughter Marushka, with whom he is rapidly falling in love, Lukas’s contempt for provincial life slowly melts away and sets him on a quest for a happiness he had never known could exist. (Synposis Credit: Pluto Film) 

More info on the movie (including a trailer) can be found here.

Vitaly Chernetsky is a professor of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007; Ukrainian-language version, 2013) and of articles on modern and contemporary Slavic and East European literatures and cultures where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is forthcoming shortly from Krytyka. He co-edited an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation, Crossing Centuries (2000), a bilingual anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Letters from Ukraine (2016), and an annotated Ukrainian translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (2007). His translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) and a volume of his selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (2018, with Ostap Kin). He is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (2009-2018) and the current vice president and learned secretary of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S.

Alevtina Kakhidze (born 1973 in Zhdanovka, Donetsk region, USSR) is based in Muzychi, Ukraine, 26 kilometers from the city capital of Kiev. Having grown up in the Donetsk region of Ukraine (since 1991), known for coal mining, she has experienced Ukraine’s abrupt and chaotic changes from the days of the USSR to the imbalanced environment after, including undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine that it is going on today. Alevtina Kakhidze attended the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kiev (1999-2004) and the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands (2004-2006). She is United Nations Tolerance Envoy in Ukraine since 2018, the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award winner in 2008, first prizewinner of the Competition for Young Curators and Artists, Kyiv, Center for Contemporary Art at NaUKMA in 2002. She is currently a CEC ArtsLink artist-in-residence at KU.