Presented in collaboration with Penn's Department of Cinema & Media Studies and Public Trust
Dir. Anna Moiseenko, 2024, 52 min.
Tree of Violence is a documentary combining animation and live-action footage to capture the extraordinary artistry of Victoria Lomasko, an artist known for depicting figures of ordinary Russians not often found in mainstream media. We see her standing still amidst public protests against the regime, carefully sketching the outlines of individuals that later appear in large-scale paintings and murals. The film chronicles Lomasko’s life just before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when she had to leave Russia in order to protect herself and her artistic integrity. Overlaying historical and personal memory, state violence and familial violence, the film shows to what extent one artist, with a single pen on paper, can engage in truth-telling at moments of tremendous political tension.
Screening followed by a conversation with artist Victoria Lomasko, and Julia Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Victoria Lomasko was born in Serpukhov, Russia in 1978. An artist and journalist, Lomasko is the author of Other Russias (n+1 Books, 2017), The Last Soviet Artist (n+1 Books, 2025), and the coauthor of Forbidden Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous shows in Europe and in the United States. She lived in Moscow until March 2022 and now lives in exile.
Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics. Her work is fundamentally comparative and transnational, and delves into the film, comics, television, and digital media of Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Prof. Alekseyeva's first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s, was published in February 2025. She is also an author-illustrator, whose award-winning non-fiction graphic novel, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution, was published in 2017, and she has published several articles on global film and media history, in both written and graphic narrative format.
