Ellina Sattarova

Visiting and Temporary Appointments

• Instructor, Dalhousie University, 07/2020-12/2022

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Ellina Sattarova is a scholar of late and post-Soviet visual culture. Her research investigates the relationship between human life and political power in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia as it is conceived (both visually and narratively) in the cinematic texts of the two periods. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Biopolitics in Contemporary Russian Cinema, in which she shows that films that aim to critique the biopolitical practices of the Russian state often (inadvertently) replicate their violent logic through their mode of spectatorial address. Of central importance to this inquiry is the question of cinema’s own entanglement not only in biopolitical, but also imperial narratives that almost inevitably converge in the Russo-Soviet context.

Research Keywords

Late Soviet cinema; post-Soviet Cinema; Central Asian cinema; contemporary Russian culture; biopolitics; necrorealism

Book Chapters

• Sattarova, E. (2020). “Russia’s Quiet Other: Dmitrii Mamuliia’s Another Sky and Aleksandr Kott’s the Test”. Cinemasaurus: Recent Russian Film in its Contemporary Context pp. 65-79. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Link to Article

Journal Article

• Sattarova, E. (2023). “The Non-final Cut: The Biopolitics of Necrorealist Cinema”. Russian Literature. Vol. 141, pp. 85-109. Link to Article