When Duke University professor Beth Holmgren became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies last year, she knew she wanted the organization's 2008 convention to focus on the theme of gender.
But instead of giving a routine annual address on the subject, the Slavic and Eurasian studies professor decided to make a documentary featuring interviews with 18 experts from Russia and the United States about the revival of women's activism and the birth of Russian women's studies twenty years ago.
The film, "Modern Russian Feminism: Twenty Years Forward," will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 20, at the Center for Documentary Studies auditorium, 1317 W. Pettigrew St. Holmgren and Igor Sopronenko, the film's director, will participate in a question-and-answer session at the event, which is free and open to the public.
Last semester, undergraduate students in Holmgren's special topics course, "Documenting Russian Feminism," read books on Russian women's history, helped locate and select visuals for the film, reviewed other documentaries on feminism, and co-authored a booklet, "A Very Short Course on Russian Women's History," to accompany the documentary. Both the DVD and booklet will be published by Indiana University Press.
Interviewees for the film include Nadezhda Azhgikhina of the Association of Russian Women Journalists, Olga Lipovskaia of the St. Petersburg Center for Gender Issues, and Anastasia Posadskaia-Vanderbeck of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies.
"The interviewees were so wonderful," Holmgren says. "They are impassioned about women's rights in Russia. They speak with such authority and drama about what happened, what went well, and what they might have done differently. They're not saying everything turned out wonderfully; the film presents their disagreements as well as their achievements."
Holmgren says there's currently a fear among Russians regarding the "oppression of alternative voices, including those of women."
"People have preconceptions of what Russian womanhood is all about," she says. "This film will open their eyes. It shows many hardworking people coming together to achieve positive results for women in Russia -- from recognizing women's participation in Russian history and politics to ridding them of the double burden of lesser paid professional labor and unpaid domestic labor. Russian women today still need our understanding and support."