Anastasia Mamaeva (Sorbonne University (Paris) / CEFRES (Prague))
This paper explores three genre co-productions by Polish director Marek Piestrak as case studies in decentralized cultural diplomacy within the late Soviet sphere. While not his only ventures into speculative cinema, Test of Pilot Pirx (1978), The Curse of the Snake Valley (1987), and The Tear of the Prince of Darkness (1992) stand out for their cross-border production structures and stylistic hybridity. Co-produced with Kyiv’s Dovzhenko Film Studios and Tallinnfilm, these films were made through regional infrastructures that bypassed centralized institutions in Moscow or Leningrad. Situated at the crossroads of science fiction, thriller, and occult horror, these films challenge both Cold War-era genre expectations and the top-down logic of cultural production within the “Eastern Bloc.” Despite their artistic traditions, Tallinn and Kyiv were treated as peripheral within the Soviet cultural hierarchy—yet this marginality proved fertile for experimentation and narrative ambiguity. Drawing on production histories, paratexts, and reception materials, the paper argues that these intra-bloc collaborations express shared late-socialist anxieties: technological overreach, imperial fatigue, and a turn toward mysticism. Through genre, they articulate a cinematic idiom that pushed against ideological orthodoxy while registering a fading geopolitical order. Rather than treating these films as kitsch anomalies, the paper reframes them as vectors of cross-republic solidarity and informal diplomacy. They exemplify how genre cinema could enable allegory, cooperation, and creative risk at a moment when official narratives were unraveling.