Birgit Beumers is Reader in Russian at the University of Bristol. She completed her D.Phil at St Antony’s College, Oxford and specializes in contemporary Russian culture, especially cinema and theatre. Her recent publications include A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and, as editor, 24 Frames: Russia and the Soviet Union (2007). She is editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of the academic journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. She is currently researching Russian animation and curates the Shiryaev archive for Viktor Bocharov.
Victor Bocharov is a film historian who graduated from the Film Institute VGIK in Moscow and worked for twenty years as editor of the popular-science film section at the Leningrad Film Studio Lenfilm. He is responsible for the discovery of the Shiryaev archive, which he acquired from the photographer Daniil Saveliev in the mid 1990s. Since then he has worked on the restoration of Shiryaev’s films and presented the first part of this work in the documentary A Belated Premiere (Zapazdavshaia prem’era, 2003).
