The film Songs of Hope and Despair(80 min, 2025) by Chto Delat International unfolds as a collective journey through history, myth, and lived experience. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Chto Delat members Dmitry Vilensky and Tsaplya Olga Egorova, who co-authored the film. Performed by cultural workers who have migrated from Russia and friends of Chto Delat, the film moves between fairy tale, political allegory, hope and despair, resistance and manipulation, mourning and the fragile possibility of change. Inspired by Werner Tübke’s monumental Panorama of the Peasants’ War in Germany, it follows a group of strange creatures who set out in search of a miracle – unaware that their journey is being manipulated by a mysterious Magician (played by Manuel Muerte). Part absurdist road movie and part magical table game, the film is set in a former mining town in Saxony-Anhalt. Songs of Hope and Despair is both an act of mourning and reckoning, a tragicomic meditation on manipulation and resistance, betrayal and solidarity, despair and fragile joy. It insists on commemorating acts of resistance, even when history repeats itself in cycles of failure.

The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in St. Petersburg by an international workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Berlin, with the aim of bringing together political theory, art, and activism. Following the forced emigration of most of its members as a result of political prosecution in Russia over their anti-war position, in 2022 the collective continued its activities as Chto Delat International, building a community in exile and cultivating new forms of collective practice based on open protocols of participation.

Screening and talk is a part of the WHW film programme Remember Freedom: Images of Resistance, in collaboration with Kamov Residency, organized by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (MMSU). The programme will be held in English.

Many thanks to MaMa Multimedia Institute for their hospitality.

The program is supported by:
Croatian Audio-Visual Center – HAVC
Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb
Kultura Nova Foundation