Imperial Residues and the Birth of the Russian Federation: Maternal Care, Racialization and Economic Migration in Ayka and Mama

Taking as its objects of study two contemporary films, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s 2018 Ayka and Anastasia Borisova’s 2019 film Mama, this article considers the vicissitudes of life as a female economic migrant and young mother in Moscow, with Mama representing the internal migration of its main protagonist from Sakha (known also as Yakutia) and Ayka the experience of a new mother from Kyrgyzstan. Both films engage the themes of pregnancy, childcare and racialised labour within post-Soviet Moscow, and they do so in analogous ways, each employing a documentary style that we might see as gesturing towards the ‘ethnofictions’ of Jean Rouch. Central to my inquiry is that both Ayka and Iye appeared at a time when pronatalist policies were actively being pursued within the Russian Federation, as part of the highly conservative agenda of V.V. Putin, and yet the dire material conditions of the films’ migrant heroines leave them unable to fully ‘assent’ to their new maternal roles.  My article considers each film’s attempt to document the unequal access to postpartum care in Russia’s metropolis and draws upon theories of cinematic spectatorship to ask whether ‘intersectional’ Russophone films can transcend the violence of voyeurism and play an active role in feminist advocacy.