Authors

Discussion

The paper titled “Donbas War and Prosthetic Memory: Ukrainian War Film in 2014-2022” will look at Ukrainian films about the armed conflict in the country’s southeast made before the full-scale invasion of 2022. By looking at such films as Invisible Battalion (2017), Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die (2017), Cacophony of Donbas (2018), Donbass (2018), The Forgotten (2019), The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020), and others, using Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory’, and applying it to a close analysis of several scenes from The Forgotten,the paper will argue that these films sought to bring domestic and international attention to the conflict by producing a ‘prosthetic memory’ of the events in the viewers who did not participate in them. In turn, these memories, I argue, were informed and shaped by previous memory narratives that were present before the experience and its prosthetic memory came into existence. In other words, I argue that some of the pre-existing understandings of Ukraine about Self and Other fed into how Ukrainian filmmakers made sense of the war in Donbas and Crimea annexation, however, not without some dramatic change in the post-Maidan period. At the same time, the films created prior to February 2022 and the narratives they reinforced and reproduced, prepared the ground for understanding the ongoing Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Therefore, Ukrainian films about the war created in 2014-2022 are both the product and conveyor of Ukraine’s collective memory, which itself has been undergoing transformations in the past ten years. While such films do demonstrate an overwhelmingly pro-Ukrainian stance, their interpretation of the war and its participants vary: some perpetuate established national and regional mnemonic narratives, thus further orientalising the warring region, whereas others, particularly the works by female filmmakers, seek to present more nuanced visions of the conflict. Nevertheless, the attention to Ukrainian war film has not been equal, which this paper notes as detrimental to the memory of the war.