Renato Serrano’s Life of Ivanna shadows a young single mother with five children inhabiting a nomadic sleigh cabin in the Russian tundra. Although the audience sees the Nenets woman attending to all her children’s needs and confidently heading her reindeer sleigh through the barely distinguishable landscape, Ivanna cannot sustain this life. Life of Ivanna provides us with an intimate representation of a family at the crossroads of isolation and inclusion, of tradition and adaptation, of loss and survival. [79 mins; documentary; Nenets and Russian with English subtitles] A Q&A with Dr. Marya Rozanova-Smith will follow the screening.
Dr. Marya Rozanova-Smith is a professorial lecturer in the Elliott School of International Affairs and a research professor at the Department of Geography at the George Washington University. In addition to her work in academia, she participated in a wide range of social projects. She was the founder and chairperson of the Center for Civil, Social, Scientific, and Cultural Initiatives “STRATEGIA” and served as a Galina Starovoitova Fellow for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Kennan Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr. Rozanova-Smith has been teaching the Arctic Affairs course at GWU in the Elliott School of International Affairs since 2018. Her current research interests include Arctic governance, urban sustainability, gender empowerment, and the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Arctic.
The screening is free, but ticketed. A link to get tickets is available on the IU Cinema page.
This film is part of the Russian Studies Workshop’s Documentary Film Series for Fall 2022:Portraits in Permafrost: Cinema of the Russian Arctic.Click here for more information on the film series.