Youth as a ‘priority theme’: Socio-political impetus and the evolution of films for youth in Russia and the Soviet Union

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the evolution of ‘films for children and youth’ from the early 1970s to 2021. The genre-category was one of the most significant in the Soviet Union, serving a political, social and artistic function as a mediator of Soviet values and norms for the youngest generation. For most of its history, critical literature has focused on the films ‘for children’ rather than youth – a more fluid category. Since the 1970s, the intrinsic tension within the genre-category led to a crisis within, with film workers and other interested parties showing concern that teenagers were not sufficiently represented on film. This tension was fed by wider societal concerns about the growing gap between the younger and older generations in the Stagnation period. Whilst youth became a key discussion point during Perestroika, the concern over how to target and guide youth audiences had started earlier. The communication gap between old and young remained unresolved through to the post-Soviet period, when the arrival of ‘priority themes’ for national film funding suggests a continued effort to differentiate between children and youth in order to shape consciousness. However, this process also reveals the lingering presence of Soviet film norms in the post-Soviet period.