Julia Alekseyeva

Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow

2025—2026 Forum on Truth

Julia Alekseyeva

Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies

Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches interactions between global media and radical leftist politics, with a particular focus on Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Prof. Alekseyeva's first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (UC Press), was published in February 2025. 

Prof. Alekseyeva is also author-illustrator of the award-winning graphic memoir Soviet Daughter (Microcosm, 2017). She has published several articles on film, art, and politics in Film History, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, ARTMargins, The Nib, The Sixties, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. Most recently, she published a translation of an article by antifascist documentary filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). Prof. Alekseyeva is also the guest editor of three forthcoming issues for Arts, JCMS, and The Journal of Japanese and Korean Studies.

Cinema-Truth and its Discontents: Prehistories and Afterlives

Cinéma-vérité is central to our contemporary conceptions of documentary “truthfulness,” but the term has a contested and murky history. The French term was first used by French sociologist Edgar Morin, who was inspired by the then-little understood early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (cinema-truth) newsreel series (1922-1925). My book project Cinema-Truth and its Discontents: Prehistories and Afterlives unveils a truly transnational history of cinéma-vérité, beginning with a study of Vertov’s own complex films and writings, weaving through productive European “misprisions,” and then to Vertovian afterlives in contemporary experimental documentary, from Bolivia to Benin to Japan. Ultimately, this book argues that understanding the complex and ambivalent history of Truth in documentary is crucial to addressing the chaos and instability of our political moment.