Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films experiment with documentary forms and practices of political cinema. They have been screened at film festivals and in art contexts worldwide, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), Docudays (Kyiv), Sheffield Doc Fest, Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig etc. His latest film Chornobyl 22 won the Grand Prix at Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2023. His texts have been published in e-flux journal, The Atlantic, and Die Tageszeitung, among others. Currently, his work is focused on investigating the toxic legacies of settler colonialism in North East Eurasia, with a focus on the rise of Russian fossil fascism and its multiple imperial wars, including the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. He collaborates with The Reckoning Project, a forensic media project aimed at documenting and prosecuting Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Based on the newly discovered film archives and in collaboration with decolonial scholars and activists, Oleksiy’s research is investigating the “toxic legacies of infrastructural colonization of Siberia in the context of the emergence of Russian fossil fascism and its multiple imperial wars.”

As part of the SAVA Creative Fellowship (2023-24), Oleksiy produced Where Russia Ends (2024), an essayistic road movie that interrogates the overlooked histories of settler colonialism and environmental destruction in Russia-occupied indigenous lands. 

In 2022, a number of previously unknown film materials had been discovered at the Science Film Studio in Kyiv, documenting several filmic expeditions undertaken in the 1980s by a group of Ukrainian filmmakers to various parts of Siberia and the Far North. These materials are the starting point for the recovery of erased histories of multiple imperialist wars that Russia had waged against its future colonies. Exploring the extractivist ideology of development of natural resources, the film exposes the multiple modes of complicity with the Russian imperialist project. ‘Where Russia Ends’ is a collaboration between the filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski and the researcher Philipp Goll. 

More information about this project can be found here.