It’s A Queer Time

Inspired by 1915 poem “It’s A Queer Time” by Robert Graves and bewitched by the poetry of St. Petersburg-based contemporary poet Stanislava Mogileva, the visual essay investigates the complexity of the personal experiences of two people during wartime: a 86-year old man, the filmmaker’s father, who as a 20-year-old Soviet Army conscript, participated in the suppression of the Hungarian liberation movement in the fall of 1956, and the filmmaker herself, the mother of a young man who was the same age as her father when the full-scale war in Ukraine began in 2022. Built as a complex audio-visual collage of heterogeneous elements, the film – the documentation of habitual spaces, leafing through a family album, recitations of poems, rituals performed for a removed organ and sonic engagement with an outdated Soviet Armed Forces ID, – is a personal response to an imminent demand to address contemporary conflicts with their devastating aftermath on bodies, psychics, lives, and futurity.