Digital Combat: Re/Framing Eastern European and Ukrainian Cinema

Digital Combat examines how contemporary warfare and historical traumas reshape the study and practice of film in Eastern Europe. Bringing together leading international scholars, the volume interrogates cultural canons, reframes national film histories, and situates recent Ukrainian cinema at the center of urgent debates about violence, testimony, and survival.

Structured in four parts, the collection moves from revisiting canonical questions to highlighting women’s voices, the ethics of documentary, and the role of new media. The chapters analyse diverse case studies, including the recovery of early Ukrainian cinema overlooked by Russian imperial narratives; portrayals of the Donbas as a “non-space” caught in perpetual conflict; female filmmakers’ reframing of war and gendered trauma; and the reflexive strategies of documentaries confronting displacement and atrocity. Further chapters explore how digital technologies, smartphones, and TikTok poetry videos transform both the aesthetics of wartime filmmaking and the preservation of cultural memory.

By combining close formal analysis with postcolonial and trauma theory, Digital Combat situates Eastern European cinema within a broader global discourse on war, exile, and the ethics of representation. It demonstrates how film and media not only record catastrophe but also create spaces of resilience, agency, and resistance. Timely and interdisciplinary, this book offers essential analyses for scholars of film studies, Slavic and East European studies, cultural memory, and conflict studies.