Beyond the single title
Film clubs, festival and programme practice, collaborations, and web experiments — work that sits beside filmography and research papers.
The lab gathers the practice that does not fit into a filmography row or a paper citation: a film club, an international festival, and web experiments that behave more like research prototypes than products.
In 2011 I organised the Bommer Brothers Film Club at the Bommer Theatre in Kharkiv — two years of watching and studying world cinema with a local community. In 2010 the same theatre hosted BOMMER-FEST, the first international film festival there: a 48-hour continuous programme of independent, documentary, animation, and experimental cinema from over 30 countries, with more than 100 films selected.
The ongoing experiments are Vasya the Reformer — an AI reconstruction of Dovzhenko’s lost 1926 debut, built as a public research site from textual sources — and Digital Dawn, a short-form cyberpunk-noir web series that extends the Dirty Russian laboratory into science-fiction aesthetics. Together these projects document how a regional cinema practice grows: through programming, community, and technological experiments beside the films themselves.
