Sonya Vseliubska's academic focus centres on Russo-Ukrainian War Documentary — a vast cinematic phenomenon that has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention, encompassing over a thousand short and feature-length films produced across more than a decade.

Her research traces the history, politics, and aesthetics of this body of work across successive generations of filmmakers, modes, and production contexts. Diachronically, she follows the trajectory from the civic documentary practices from the onset of the Revolution of Dignity to the frontline filmmaking of the ongoing full-scale invasion. Aesthetically, her interest spans everything from visually sublime observational festival hits to montages of drone footage assembled by military battalions and uploaded to Telegram.

She is particularly drawn to the tension between immediacy and mediation in wartime cinema; the techno-acceleration of documentary audiovisual form and operational vision; questions of phenomenology and time in wartime documentary; and the ethical boundaries of representing violence and trauma on screen, including broader debates around the aestheticisation of war. Alongside this, she is independently developing a database of Russo-Ukrainian war-related documentaries, organised by formal and contextual criteria, as a methodological tool for mapping the field.

Her broader research interests include Ukrainian and other (post-)Soviet narrative cinema, Holocaust cinema, fiction war spectacles, documentary theory, and archival film, alongside phenomenology, with particular attention to questions of time, memory, and spectatorship across these fields.

For academic and non-academic commissions, film recommendations, or simply to say hi — vseluybets@gmail.com