Director Nigina Sayfullaeva’s debut feature film, Name Me (2013), was screened on Dickinson’s campus for students and faculty on April 13, 2016. The film tells the story of two recent high school graduates, Olga and Sasha, who travel from Moscow to Crimea so that Olga can reunite with the father she has never met. The film was introduced by Alexander Kolbovskiy, a journalist and film critic from Russia’s Channel One who is a visiting scholar in the Russian Department this month. The screening was followed by a lively discussion where students and faculty weighed in on the film’s cinematography, current trends in Russian filmmaking, and the social phenomenon of “fatherlessness” in Russo-Soviet culture and history.
For Barrett Ziegler ’16, the screening was a chance to update his knowledge of filmmaking in Russia. “Having taken a Russian Film class last semester, I was excited to see what more modern Russian films might be like. That this was a female-directed film was all the more interesting, conveying a different aspect of film than the primarily male cinema we had seen in class.”
