Reimagining Migration and White “Western” Masculinities in Baltic Cinema

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206.

media release: Recent Baltic films about migration have revisited and reimagined the recurring cinematic trope of a victimized Baltic/Eastern European woman who is seeking a better life in Western/Northern Europe. This talk focuses on Jaak Kilmi’s film The Dissidents (Sangarid, 2017, Estonia) and Romas Zabarauskas’s film The Lawyer (Advokatas, 2020, Lithuania) that provide a different kind of engagement with migration, whiteness, gender, and sexuality in the Baltic countries as these countries were moving away from the “post-Soviet” and realigned themselves with (Western) Europeanness. As Roos demonstrates in this talk, both films explore what this realignment might mean through different ways of performing what the characters understand to be “Western” masculinity. This talk will analyze these films closely and situate them in the new cinematic engagements with colonial/racial histories, gender politics, and white privilege in the Baltic region.

About the speaker: Liina-Ly Roos is assistant professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in Nordic and Baltic film, television, literary and cultural studies, with a specific focus on migration, race and ethnicity, sexual politics, postcolonial, and childhood studies. Her articles have appeared in Baltic Screen Media Review, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Journal of Baltic Studies, Journal of Scandinavian Studies, and Methis: Studia humaniora Estonica. 

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