ReFocus: The Films of Kira Muratova

The first English-language collection devoted to Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova (1934–2018)

• Offers new historical, analytical and theoretical insights, filling significant gaps in scholarship on Kira Muratova’s cinema
• Brings together a wide range of approaches: from Soviet and Ukrainian film history to film philosophy, intermediality, decolonial critique, disability studies, posthumanist theory, feminist and queer studies, and analyses of affect and gesture
• Repositions Muratova within European and global cinema, highlighting thematic and stylistic connections to the avant-garde, Formalism, New Wave traditions and transnational film movements
• Provides a comparative framework, placing Muratova in dialogue with Agnès Varda, Sergei Parajanov, Lana Gogoberidze, Andrei Tarkovsky and Herbert Achternbusch
• Reframe Muratova as an autrice working at the edges of language, genre and empire

Spanning six decades, her seventeen features and four shorts move from the late Soviet era to post-Soviet Ukraine, breaking cinematic rules with repetition, collage, unruly performance and a tactile, object-rich world. This volume reframes Muratova as an autrice working from the margins and proposes ‘ex-cinema’ as a central concept in her radical practice at the edges of language, genre, and empire.

Across four parts, leading and emerging scholars examine form and style, gender and queer aesthetics, ethics and community and Muratova’s dialogues with European cinema. Attending to decolonial questions, feminist perspectives, and the politics of visibility, the volume shows how her films unsettle canons and centres while tracing the collective artistry behind them.

It offers an accessible, interdisciplinary guide to a singular filmmaker and fresh scholarship for students, researchers and cinephiles.