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Contemporary Russian Politics and Culture Through the Prism of Film

Wednesday, May 22, 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery
Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center
165 W. 65th Street
Plaza Level

Free, RSVP below.

Read Russia presents an evening of conversation with documentary filmmaker Paul Mitchell, director of the 2012 Peabody Award-winning BBC/NatGeo series Putin, Russia and the West. Paul Mitchell will discuss contemporary Russian politics and culture and the issues surrounding their portrayal through film. The evening will include screenings of  excerpts from Putin, Russia and the West, Mitchell's 2002 PBS documentary on Chechnya Greetings from Grozny, and a sneak preview of Russia's Open Book, a new feature-length documentary on contemporary Russian literature hosted by actor and author Stephen Fry, due for its U.S. television release this fall. The conversation will be moderated by Eliot Borenstein, Professor of the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University and author of numerous books and articles on contemporary Russian culture and society.

Paul Mitchell, born in Boston, began working in television in 1986 for ABC News Moscow. Since 1990 he has lived in the UK producing award-winning films for the BBC, Discovery Channel, Channel 4, France Télévision, PBS, and National Geographic. His films have covered subjects as diverse as the history of perestroika and rock and roll in the USSR to the fate of the orphans of Argentina's dirty war.  The Death of Yugoslavia (1995) is no. 87 on the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest British television programmes of any genre ever to have been screened. Mitchell's films have won the du-Pont Columbia Journalism, the Peabody, the Emmy, BAFTA, Royal Television Society, New York Festival, and the Greirson awards.