“Dumping” the Soviet Myth of Russian Provinces in the Independent Cinema of the 2010s

This chapter explores the representation of wastelands, dumps, and landfills in the Russian cinema of the 2010s and 2020s as a geopolitical concept, an empty space, or a “non-space.” The representation of the outskirts and provinces in Russian cinema has always been associated with a source of spirituality. In films from the 2010s, however, the road out of Moscow has increasingly been shown as leading nowhere or, in the best-case scenario, ending at a landfill. Cinematic spaces suggest not only a dead end in spatial terms but also a conflation of time, where the ruins of the past become the ruins of the future in the absence of a present time. The spaces are, as in many films about the underground music scene of the 1980s, derelict and disused buildings. At the same time, more mainstream works use the space of a landfill as a critique of capitalism and suggest a return, if not to Soviet values, then at least to global “green” values. The chapter explores whether this signifies a shift in the representation of the Soviet past in the present context.