Sonya Vseliubska's academic focus is Russo-Ukrainian war documentary, a vast and under-researched cinematic phenomenon, encompassing over a thousand short and feature-length films made across more than a decade. Her Cambridge MPhil dissertation proposed a framework for reading how these films reconfigure the aesthetics and politics of documenting the war, laying the ground for wider research that traces the recent history of this national documentary across successive generations of filmmakers, production contexts, conceptual modes and artful sensory registers.

Her research explores the evolving tension between immediacy and mediation in Ukrainian wartime cinema, from the Revolution of Dignity to the ongoing full-scale war, examining the transformation of documentary form and the expansion of operational vision through technological acceleration, as well as the ethics of representing the visceral at the boundary between aesthetics and aestheticisation. Alongside this she is independently building a database of Russo-Ukrainian war documentaries, organised by formal and contextual criteria, as a tool for mapping the field.

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

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