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Having arrived in Moscow in 2014 to study at the leading film school, author and film worker Misha Zakharov began documenting his experiences of coming of age as queer, Korean, and precarious amidst the dramatically shifting and hostile political and cultural landscape of Putin’s Russia. Between 2016 and 2020, he wrote what would become Doramaroman — an autofictional novel whose title combines dorama (i.e. a Korean TV drama) and bildungsroman, signalling the interplay between cinema and literature that runs throughout the book. A kind of scrapbook, which can also be read as a collection of essays, Doramaroman engages with a wide range of visually driven media — from comic books (Alan Moore’s Promethea) to video games (Façade) to the cinema of Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis — in order to explore topics such as mixed-race identity, precarious labour in the cultural sector, fascination with the moving image, the writing process, gay sexual politics in contemporary Russia, and the states of drifting, mutating, and being on the move. Standing outside canonical Russian gay writing of Gennady Trifonov, Yevgeny Kharitonov, Slava Mogutin, or Sergey Khazov-Kassia, it instead approaches queer identity intersectionally, considering Misha’s positionality as someone from the periphery, of colour, and trying to make it. The book was published in October 2022, a few months before the newly intensified version of the anti-LGBTQ+ law was introduced in December 2022, and following Misha’s own departure from Russia in early March of that year.

In this keynote, drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s Archive of Feelings and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer ephemera, Misha will reposition his novel Doramaroman as a historical document and glimpse into film, contemporary art, and the broader cultural life of Russia after the occupation of Crimea and before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as an unruly decolonial seed now beginning to bear fruit. He will situate the work within several literarytraditions — includingqueer, feminist, and immigrant film criticism (Eric de Kuyper, Serge Daney, Kier-La Janisse, Hamid Naficy); film-related autofiction (Chris Kraus, Qiu Miaojin); memoir and experimental writing by Korean American authors (Jane Jeong Trenka, Alexander Chee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha); and Russophone queer carceral writing (Ali Feruz, Evgeny Shtorn, Sergei Parajanov) — while proposing a new form of writing in which film and life writing are inseparable. Misha will also reflect on his practice as a translator of queer literature into Russian, including seminal texts such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, as well as the subtitles for the first-ever (and most likely last) retrospective of Barbara Hammer in Russia.

The event — reading from Doramaroman (10 mins) and keynote lecture by Misha Zakharov (40 mins), followed by a Q&A (20 mins) — will conclude with a film screening, featuring Maxim Pechersky’s acclaimed autofictional short The Year of the White Moon (2021).

On the speaker

Misha Zakharov (b. 1996; he/they) is a Russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent as well as a pro-Ukrainian political refugee in the UK. He is a London-based author and film worker, with a particular interest in queer and decolonial perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. He is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Film & TV Studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry. His academic and film-curatorial work investigates film events as sites of (un)learning, world-making from below, and South-South solidarity.

Misha’s debut novel Doramaroman was published in 2022 by the now-defunct No Kidding Press. The first chapter of Doramaroman appeared in Tupelo Quarterly in 2024, translated into English by Nathan Jeffers. His writing residencies include the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2013) and the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2023).

Extra: The Year of the White Moon, dir. Maxim Pechersky, Russia, 2021, 21 mins

In the intimacy of a muted, deserted living room, a series of telephone conversations take place between a superstitious mother living in the Russian provinces and her gay son, who moved to the capital. The Year of the White Moon is a tragicomedy about a conversation between two people who hear each other, but are not able to listen.

On the filmmaker

Maxim Pechersky is a filmmaker working at the intersection of visual arts, theatre, and artistically driven film and video projects.

Born and raised in Yekaterinburg, Russia, he graduated in 2022 with a degree in documentary film directing from VGIK, Russia’s leading film school. He has collaborated with artists such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Curver Thoroddsen, and Julian Charrière. He made his directorial debut with the short film The Year of the White Moon (2021), which received acclaim at major film festivals, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Sheffield Doc/Fest. He lives and works in Berlin.

Attendance is free, but registration is obligatory via this link. If you cannot attend in person, you can register for streaming.