Please join us for a screening of the documentary film "Oscar" (2018), introduced by the directors Eugene Tsymbal and Aleksandr Smoljanski and followed with a discussion with artist Vitaly Komar and Olena Martynyuk (Harriman Institute) moderated by Mark Lipovetsky (Slavic Department) and Daria Ezerova (Harriman Institute). Film run time: 90 minutes.
The post-screening discussion will be live streamed on the Harriman Institute's Facebook page.
This crowdfunded, award-winning project is the story of one of the most famous Russian artists, Oscar Rabin (1928-2018), who challenged the Soviet communist system and won. In 1974, he organized an open-air art exhibition, which the KGB smashed with the bulldozers. This was the most effective act of civil disobedience in the USSR after Stalin’s death in 1953. The story spans three decades of the Soviet history and documents Oscar’s successful attempts to confront the regime with paints and brushes. This is a story about non-violent resistance to the forces of evil, about the borders of compromise, about people who tried to preserve internal freedom in a country that wasn’t free. It is a refugee success story: a story of love, art and human dignity.
Among the people who contributed to the film are writers Boris Akunin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Gorodnitsky, historians Vyach. Vs. Ivanov, Maya Turovskaya, Adam Michnik, Donald Rayfield, Georg Witte and Karl Eimermacher, artists Eric Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Tselkov and Vitaly Komar, pianist Evgeny Kissin.
