Representation of Crimean Tatar Culture in Contemporary Ukrainian Feature Cinema

This study conceptualizes contemporary Ukrainian feature cinema as a discursive space in which Crimean Tatar experience is gradually articulated as an active subject of historical representation rather than an object of external narration. Drawing on memory studies and postcolonial theory, the analysis reconstructs the evolution of representational models from 2003–2025 and formulates a framework for understanding how film participates in processes of symbolic decolonization.Early representations rely on metaphorical inclusion, where the Crimean Tatar world functions as a symbolic element within a shared territorial mythology. This model is followed by partial personalization, which introduces everyday cultural textures but still presents them from an external perspective. A decisive shift occurs with the emergence of internally framed trauma narratives centered on the 1944 deportation. Here, cinema transforms communicative memory into cultural memory and establishes Crimean Tatars as agents of historical narration.Subsequent films move beyond victimhood toward the portrayal of ethical agency, presenting Crimean Tatar characters as moral actors whose decisions affirm dignity under conditions of total violence. The motif of return further reconfigures Crimea as a symbolically significant homeland structured by intergenerational responsibility rather than mere geography. In the context of the 2014 occupation and the ongoing war, Crimean Tatar presence becomes embedded in a shared Ukrainian framework of resistance, redefining solidarity as a joint ethical and geopolitical stance.The article argues that these shifts collectively signal a transition from speaking about Crimean Tatars to speaking with them. However, representation remains concentrated around major traumatic events — deportation, repression, occupation—while everyday cultural continuity and internal plurality are underrepresented. Expanding cinematic discourse requires integrating multiple voices, normalizing cultural presence beyond catastrophe, and recognizing Crimean Tatar history as constitutive of Ukraine’s broader postcolonial condition. Through such strategies, cinema becomes not merely a medium of remembrance but an active site of decolonial knowledge production

Collective memory · Homeland · Movie theater · Narrative · Tatar · Ukrainian · Cinema and Media Studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Soviet and Russian History