Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw is the first concentrated study of Ukrainian cinema in English. In particular, historian Joshua First explores the politics and aesthetics of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema during the Soviet 1960s-70s. He argues that film-makers working at the Alexander Dovzhenko Feature Film Studio in Kyiv were obsessed with questions of identity and demanded that the Soviet film industry and audiences alike recognize Ukrainian cultural difference. The first two chapters provide background on how Soviet cinema since Stalin cultivated an exoticised and...