Carceral Cinema, Intermission: Gay Propaganda

Curated by Misha Zakharov

Carceral Cinema is a two-year project designed to spark conversations. Carcerality, representations of prisons, and race and gender in the context of incarceration are explored through the lens of film.

Following a sold-out screening of pioneering films about women in North American prisons at Flatpack 2025, Carceral Cinema returns with a second installment. This special event brings together live presentation, a rarely screened tape, and a discussion, all centred on state-legislated homophobia and incarceration in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.

The event will conclude with a conversation between curator Misha Zakharov and PhD researcher Gina Matuska, followed by an audience Q&A.

Gina's research at Birmingham City University focuses on local queer cinema heritage.

Programme

Gay Propaganda: A Live Desktop Essay by Misha Zakharov
Tracing various models of incarceration - from Soviet criminalisation to the legal constructs of ‘gay propaganda’ and ‘LGBT extremism’ in contemporary Russia - this live desktop presentation features a collage of pieces of legislation, prison letters, court statements, and excerpts from prison memoirs.

Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (Dir: John Greyson, 1986)
Canadian experimental filmmaker John Greyson recounts his trip to the Soviet Union as part of the Canadian delegation to the Youth Festival in Moscow in 1985. A pun on the Oscar-winning Soviet heterosexual rom-com *Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears *(1980), Greyson’s short film attempts to make sense of the decline of Soviet sexual emancipation and the emergence of the queer underground.

This event was supported by a bursary from the Film & Television Studies Department at the University of Warwick.