Teaching Workshop: Contemporary Cinema in Russian

The laboratory is adressed to students of Russian language, who have yet to acquire the 3 ects for laboratory activities, attending the 3rd year of degree course in Foreign Language and Literatures and the 1st and the 2nd years of the degree couse in European and Extra-European Languages and Literatures. It aims to analyze some Russian film productions of the 2000s, which are focused on the theme related to the absence of the father and to the search for him. The analysis of the films, that each partecipant to the laboratory has to watch entirely independently, will be articulated on both cultural and linguistic levels. A part of the work will be focused to a reflection on the historical-cultural meaning of the father figure in contemporary Russia and it will be supported also by the reading of short texts on these theme. Another part will be focused on the recognition and on the analysis of the linguistic structures (lexical, morphological and syntactic) used in the films in order to describe family and social relationships, as well as the role recognized to the education in the social sphere. From the linguistic point of view the analyzed structures will be described also considering the characteristics of the style which they belong to.

At the end of the course students will have acquired knowledge about contemporary Russian culture, with particularly attention to the education and to the family relationships. They will also have developed critical and argumentative skills, that will allow them to consider the analyze topic with reference to a wider context of Russian cultural and literar history. Students will also have developed linguistic skills that will allow them a more immediate understanding of the colloquial Russian language in relation to the focused theme. Moreover they will be able, thanks to the linguistic analysis, better to understand and describe the film characters as expression of a precise socio-cultural context.