Masha Godovannaya

It could be an ordinary trip on the Staten Island ferry. But shot with single frames, with a few colors added and with just 30 seconds of running time, it becomes a trip on a magic ferry…

“MUZHCHINI”, when pronounced by emphasizing every letter, means “mature men” in Russian. It is a catchphrase of Yevgeniy Yufit, the father of the Russian necrorealist movement and the hero of the film. This word well describes his attitude towards and interest in specific elements of Russian masculinity, which have been among the several themes of his own films. The second protagonist is Yuri Zverlin, an artist from St. Petersburg and star of Yufit’s feature “Killed by Lightning”; the third, an anonymous “Lenfilm” filmmaker. We were on a trip to the sacred monastery of lake Seliger; it all started inside its ecological pyramid, built without single nail supposedly maintaining the equilibrium of the region. It has no effect on us…

A short music video by Masha Godovannaya

No synopsis available yet.

Do you believe in ghosts? An incantation becomes a refrain in this two-channel projection of sequences from an old film, recaptured on a Lomo lens. It’s all in her* hands shaping his form, her* labour questioning his authority.

As if in response to Susan Suleiman’s aphorism on motherhood “Mothers don’t write, they are written” and Julia Kristeva’s question “After the Virgin [Mary] what do we know about the inner discourse of a mother?” I decided to do a film on my own experience as a mother who is also an artist and the ambivalent but poignant process of inscribing a child into my life.

It could be an ordinary trip on the Staten Island ferry. But shot with single frames, with a few colors added and with just 30 seconds of running time, it becomes a trip on a magic ferry…

“MUZHCHINI”, when pronounced by emphasizing every letter, means “mature men” in Russian. It is a catchphrase of Yevgeniy Yufit, the father of the Russian necrorealist movement and the hero of the film. This word well describes his attitude towards and interest in specific elements of Russian masculinity, which have been among the several themes of his own films. The second protagonist is Yuri Zverlin, an artist from St. Petersburg and star of Yufit’s feature “Killed by Lightning”; the third, an anonymous “Lenfilm” filmmaker. We were on a trip to the sacred monastery of lake Seliger; it all started inside its ecological pyramid, built without single nail supposedly maintaining the equilibrium of the region. It has no effect on us…

A short music video by Masha Godovannaya

No synopsis available yet.

Do you believe in ghosts? An incantation becomes a refrain in this two-channel projection of sequences from an old film, recaptured on a Lomo lens. It’s all in her* hands shaping his form, her* labour questioning his authority.

As if in response to Susan Suleiman’s aphorism on motherhood “Mothers don’t write, they are written” and Julia Kristeva’s question “After the Virgin [Mary] what do we know about the inner discourse of a mother?” I decided to do a film on my own experience as a mother who is also an artist and the ambivalent but poignant process of inscribing a child into my life.

short film by Masha Godovannaya

The exploratory film “Hair Curlers on a Bald Man” is dedicated to Georgy Frantsevich Millyar (born de Milieu), a unique figure in Soviet cinema — the actor who played “every imp, troll, and hobgoblin”, the unforgettable Baba Yaga and the allegorical Koschei in the fairy-tale films by Alexander Rou, as well as a host of other parts and walk-ons. Drawn from documents in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Museum of Cinema, Mosfilm, the Gorky Film Studio, Gosfilmofond, the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, and the Gelendzhik Museum of Local History, the film turns into Millyar’s own archive — a mythical territory where the actor’s life and the history of Soviet cinema assemble into a collage on memory and on a person’s place in history.

The exploratory film “Hair Curlers on a Bald Man” is dedicated to Georgy Frantsevich Millyar (born de Milieu), a unique figure in Soviet cinema — the actor who played “every imp, troll, and hobgoblin”, the unforgettable Baba Yaga and the allegorical Koschei in the fairy-tale films by Alexander Rou, as well as a host of other parts and walk-ons. Drawn from documents in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Museum of Cinema, Mosfilm, the Gorky Film Studio, Gosfilmofond, the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, and the Gelendzhik Museum of Local History, the film turns into Millyar’s own archive — a mythical territory where the actor’s life and the history of Soviet cinema assemble into a collage on memory and on a person’s place in history.

The exploratory film “Hair Curlers on a Bald Man” is dedicated to Georgy Frantsevich Millyar (born de Milieu), a unique figure in Soviet cinema — the actor who played “every imp, troll, and hobgoblin”, the unforgettable Baba Yaga and the allegorical Koschei in the fairy-tale films by Alexander Rou, as well as a host of other parts and walk-ons. Drawn from documents in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Museum of Cinema, Mosfilm, the Gorky Film Studio, Gosfilmofond, the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, and the Gelendzhik Museum of Local History, the film turns into Millyar’s own archive — a mythical territory where the actor’s life and the history of Soviet cinema assemble into a collage on memory and on a person’s place in history.

For a long time Saint Patrick has been touted as the redemptor of Pagan Ireland: the man who rid the country of its snake population. We felt it was time the snakes got their due – You Can’t Keep A Good Snake Down redresses this historical imbalance.

It is my endeavor to stop time for a moment and to look through a different prism at things which have been around us for so long, forgotten and unnoticeable by us for so long. Forest, lake, meadow, sky... twilight... moon.

This film is an exploration of unseen but intensely felt encounters: dreams. The fear – maternal fear – of loss, of separation from a child creeps into the self, bypassing the defence mechanism. Fear expands in dreams. The film’s images become a potential substitute and a release from the terror of these haunting, unimaginable sensations.

This film is the record of a traumatic reaction to the terrorist acts in the Moscow subway of March 29, 2010.

A found-footage film that exhilarates via virtuosic editing, this homage to early Soviet-era cinema pioneer Sergei Eisenstein reconfigures extracts from several of the maestro’s classics—such as Battleship Potemkin—into something fresh and provocative. Inspired by Eisenstein’s seminal montage theories, the director works in tandem with composer Federico Schmucler to thrillingly evoke tumult.

A letter from the dead dog Laika, the first conqueror of space. This is the story of her heroic deeds and martyrdom, a document of one of many lives it was deemed necessary to sacrifice in the name of the human plan for conquest and domination.

A film representing a stroll through St. Petersburg. Captured by a broken frame composition, deserted streets, frozen city infrastructure, stone embankments, pigeons in parks, dandelions breaking through the pavements, aberrations of color and light evoke an increasing sense of unease. Ambient sounds—random conversations, city noises, and a track composed by Mexican sound artist Enrique Arriaga—merge with the visuals, making the film a direct speech of a human/camera/witness about what clearly audible in the actual urban space.

A film representing a stroll through St. Petersburg. Captured by a broken frame composition, deserted streets, frozen city infrastructure, stone embankments, pigeons in parks, dandelions breaking through the pavements, aberrations of color and light evoke an increasing sense of unease. Ambient sounds—random conversations, city noises, and a track composed by Mexican sound artist Enrique Arriaga—merge with the visuals, making the film a direct speech of a human/camera/witness about what clearly audible in the actual urban space.

A film representing a stroll through St. Petersburg. Captured by a broken frame composition, deserted streets, frozen city infrastructure, stone embankments, pigeons in parks, dandelions breaking through the pavements, aberrations of color and light evoke an increasing sense of unease. Ambient sounds—random conversations, city noises, and a track composed by Mexican sound artist Enrique Arriaga—merge with the visuals, making the film a direct speech of a human/camera/witness about what clearly audible in the actual urban space.

This film is based on Holes and Bone, two poems by American poet, lesbian and cult figure of the New York poetry scene Eileen Myles. The film is an exchange between two queer sensibilities and a dialogue between two women who have emigrated.

The film is conceived as a free cinematic improvisation vaguely based on the myth of the Phoenix.

The film is based on a spontaneous interview with Godovannaya’s father, recorded at an airport in the summer of 2022. For the first time, he shares his family album, revealing moments of childhood, growing up, military service, and photos of cherished friends, relatives, children, and grandchildren, alongside stories of relocations, encounters, and partings.

The film is based on a spontaneous interview with Godovannaya’s father, recorded at an airport in the summer of 2022. For the first time, he shares his family album, revealing moments of childhood, growing up, military service, and photos of cherished friends, relatives, children, and grandchildren, alongside stories of relocations, encounters, and partings.

The film is based on a text by an art historian Koivo on how architectural elements of the past find themselves in mundane structures of our everyday. Together we walked Vienna in search of these architectural residues and their inscription into the urban landscape with the haunted history.

A visual study which sketches the forms and outlines, the margins of queer kinships lived and practiced by the local queer community of post-socialist Split, Croatia.

A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.

The film contains traces of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. “An articulation of what is unexplainable but felt. Touching what touches us and leaves us in a state of confusion, feeling empty, alone and questioning. Touch is an act of orientation.” - Keith Sanborn.

A feature-length experimental documentary that captures traces of queer existence and intimate arrangements lived by non-privileged queers who navigate their experiences of migration in the city of Vienna. The film unfolds narratives of five queer migrants from contexts outside of the Global North which have been marked by gender violence, homophobia, economic instability, and social misbalance. Beyond narratives of damage, marginality is lived through and treated in the film as a space for emancipation and resistance – full of humor and joy, dignity and erotic, emancipation and struggle.

A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.

An idiosyncratic personal reflection on a mythical image of masculinity in cinema and the clash between cinematic representation and real life. Endlessly repeated shots of aeroplanes and paratroopers taken from Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Aerograd (1935) and an absurd anthem to mythical masculine powers are confronted by home video footage with a much less heroic intonation.

On April 14, 2014 Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a right-wing politician, publicly attacked two female journalists simply because one of them asked about the sanctions against Ukraine. He ordered to his guards “rape” and “kiss her hard” regardless of her pregnancy and threatened another one with unemployment when she defended her colleague. None of male journalists stood behind the women and tried to stop the high-ranked attacker and his followers.

A record of the lockdown spring of 2020, shot from the window of the director’s rented apartment in Vienna. Diary entries help to stave off the madness of isolation. The camera keeps track of time and reclaims the past. Cinema offers a reprieve from loneliness.

This film is a personal dedication to New York, “a city symphony” to the place which means so much to me…

The horizons of trembling film landscapes, captured on expired Soviet film, long out of production, developed by hand, break through the closed spaces of the city, reminding of the lost phenomenon of natural borders. For a short time, a person becomes, literally, the bearer of image and sound - he is given power over space, which usually oppresses him. For a while, he can turn it into something new or remind you of something long forgotten, elusive.

The original film was shot in 2001 and its description sounded like: «It could be an ordinary trip on the Staten Island ferry. But shot with single frames, with a few colors added and with just 30 seconds of running time, it becomes a trip on a magic ferry... ». But in 2005 the sound was added - the music by LU who composed it especially for the film and this short movie has gotten its second life and ten more seconds...

The iconic depiction of Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film. Joan, destined to become a symbol of faith, patriotism and self-sacrifice. The separation of flesh and spirit. A little more and she would be a proto-feminist martyr. Is that too much to ask of you, Joan?

On March 18, 2014 President Putin gave a speech to both chambers of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. He declared the Crimea as a part of the Russian Federation. He said: “Esteemed friends, we have gathered here today because of an issue that is of vital importance, of historical significance for us all. On March 17, a referendum took place in the Crimea; it was held in full compliance with democratic procedures and the norms of international law. Voter turnout was more than 82 %. More than 96 % voted for reunification with Russia. The figures are extremely compelling.” He gave the speech. The war continues. The plague have started.

This film is a pure fascination with a filmic quality of the image captured on 16mm expired stock, hand-developed while neglecting rules of color processing and manipulated on a JK optical printer. Shot in 2008 it presents a transformed picture of Rotterdam's windmills reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age paintings and traditional Delft tiles.

While walking around my Brooklyn neighborhood, I noticed these children joyfully playing in the spring sunshine. By chance I had my 16mm camera with me – and was able to film them. They were not afraid of me and my presence didn’t bother them. Somehow I was invited into their game, so similar to the first Round Dance of spring.

Nearly all of us have shot home movies: on film, on video tape, or using the digital cameras built in to our mobile phones. We have filmed our children, family celebrations, or holidays. Now, imagine how a home-movie might look like if it were shot in the Warsaw Ghetto at the beginning of the 1940s by a German worker on vacation… 2 home-movies invites the viewer to look again at historically charged material from a different perspective and to think about our desire to pick-up a camera to record disasters.