Kino Nights Film Series

Named in the honor of the groundbreaking documentary work of The Kino-Eye Collective who revolutionized the representation of reality in cinema in the 1920s, Kino Nights is a new curated series of themed monthly screenings and conversations at the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. We feature present-day groundbreaking documentary and narrative cinema from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, contextualized in timely conversations with scholars and artists. Luiza Parvu and Toma Peiu program the series and facilitate the conversations. The screenings and conversations are free and open to all to attend.

In Fall 2025, Kino Nights: Coming Together, Coming Apart showcases representations of migration, displacement, and exile in present-day cinema from Eurasia and Eastern Europe. The films show us how people relate to new places, cope with change in their homelands or in their adopted communities; and how adverse circumstances and cultural transformation put and keep people on the move. What does it mean to make a new home, or to bid farewell to an old one? How does time add perspective to life choices? The filmmakers in this program reveal the threads that bind us to places; the pathways that take us to one another or help us bypass existential threats; the lines of desire that lead our wandering in the world; the coming together and the coming apart.

In Spring 2025, Kino Nights: Representing Trauma featured bold films that address personal and collective trauma. Our line-up included documentary and fiction films that touch on historical events that have left scars in the consciousness of the filmmakers, and their audiences. The works we presented go beyond the descriptive to evoke the unthinkable and process the shock and horror without exploiting it, by using a distinct cinematic language. They create sensory experiences, spaces of shared imagination and affect that put audiences in fellowship with people, places and events of rupture, punctuated by violence, genocide, or catastrophe that reverberate long after they have unfolded.