The last issue in 2024 is a regular one. However, articles submitted to this issue create some thematic clusters. In particular, several articles concern documentary films and their use in different types of state activities, such as the protection of cultural heritage and economic development.
First, Mantė Valiūnaitė in ‘Regained Screens: Contemporary Documentary Film Culture in Lithuania’ explores new documentary films produced in this Baltic country, both through examining their textual characteristics and the programming of the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival (VDFF). Using interviews and analyses of festival catalogues, Valiūnaitė argues that documentary cinema in her country became hybridised. Next, Andrea Průchová Hrůzová discusses the post-war trajectory of the Czechoslovak politics of cultural heritage, its public presentation and circulation through the medium of non-fiction film. It investigates the genres of ethnographic, geographic, and art films released after the political transformation in 1948 that brought the country under the direct influence of the Soviet Union. It describes the professional infrastructure and networks within which the fields of cultural heritage preservation and non-fiction cinema were operating and analyses their interactions in the realm of film production. Ana Grgić and Fabio Bego also analyse non-fiction ‘useful’ films, on this occasion employed for the promotion of industrial production in socialist Albania and Yugoslavia. Specifically, they focus on two short films, The Night Shift (1970, Albania) and 25th Anniversary of Jugoplastika (1977, Yugoslavia). Their analysis allows to examine the similarities and differences of Albanian and Yugoslav socialist ideologies toward industrial production, labour and gender relations. during the Cold War period. The documentary part finishes with an article by Teisi Ligi and Teet Teinemaa, who analyse three New Wave Documentaries, The Old Man and the Land, Ruhnu and Bridges of Time, using John L. Austin’s speech act theory. This allows them to show how the chosen films avoid reproducing a given reality by creating a semantic shift away from the surface structure in order to connote a rustic pre-occupation sensibility.
The remaining articles in this issue concern fiction cinema and television. Krzysztof E. Borowski offers an analysis of the Netflix television series 1983, created by Joshua Long, which offers a fictional, dystopian Poland as a totalitarian state in which martial law never ended and the communist party remains in power. Borowski argues that this representation can serve as metaphor of post-2015 Poland ruled by the Law and Justice party.
Finally, Tanya Silverman examines the career of the prominent Czech actor Bolek Polívka, known from films such as Pupendo (2003) and Something Like Happiness (2005), exploring his antiheroic roles as father figures responding to local social codes and notions about the West and comparing them to familiar figures in the Czech cultural canon, most importantly Josef Švejk.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).