Oleksiy Radynski
Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films experiment with documentary forms and practices of political cinema. They have been screened at film festivals and in exhibition contexts worldwide, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), Docudays (Kyiv), Sheffield Doc Fest, Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig etc. His film Chornobyl 22 won the Grand Prix at Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2023.
WHERE RUSSIA ENDS
2024
Video, sound, transferred from 35 mm film to HD
25:13 min
Courtesy the artist
Where Russia Ends by Oleksiy Radynski (b. 1984, Kyiv) is an essayistic road movie that investigates the often-overlooked histories of settler colonialism and environmental destruction in Russian-occupied Indigenous territories. The work emerges from the discovery of previously unknown archival film materials at the Science Film Studio in Kyiv in 2022, documenting a series of 1980s expeditions by Ukrainian filmmakers across Siberia and the Far North.
These recovered fragments form the starting point for a wider reconstruction of erased and suppressed histories, revealing the long trajectory of imperial expansion and the multiple wars waged against Indigenous populations in what would become colonies of the Russian state. Echoing Radynski’s wider documentary works examining the political, ecological, and industrial legacies of the Soviet and post-Soviet landscape, the film traces how cinematic documentation itself became entangled with systems of extraction and control.
Where Russia Ends exposes the extractivist ideology underpinning the so-called development of natural resources, where landscapes are transformed into sites of exploitation. Radynski’s work reflects on the layered complicities – cultural, scientific, and cinematic – that enabled the Russian imperial project to persist and expand across vast and contested territories.
Oleksiy Radynski participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Near East Far West (03.10.25–08.01.26) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
