Climate Festival 2026 - Peace Letters to Silenced Landscapes
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused devastating and lasting harm not only to people but also to ecosystems and wildlife. While this ecological destruction is happening in Ukraine, the emotional impact and sense of loss are shared across borders. Even in peacetime, many of us recognise the pain of witnessing places we care about transformed or erased through redevelopment, neglect or natural causes. This event creates a space for emotional solidarity through shared practices of film viewing, responding to it in writing and conversation, placing Ukraine’s wartime ecological disaster within a wider, transnational context.
We will start with watching the UK premiere of a Ukrainian documentary Divia (dir. Dmytro Hreshko, 2025) — a poetic, sound-rich exploration of Ukrainian landscapes ravaged by the war. The film is a non-verbal meditation on how wars harm, scar, and ruin the natural environment, often beyond any chance of repair. It is also an exploration of the power of the life cycle, which always eventually prevails, even if cycles of violence repeat themselves, as they have in Ukraine.
The screening will be followed by a poetic writing workshop led by renowned Belarusian poet and activist Hanna Komar. During the workshop, Hanna will guide the audience through the trauma of war emerging in the film’s haunting images, inviting the audience to respond to them and to connect these images with the landscapes and natural spaces that are familiar to them and are silenced by human activity or intervention. Through a series of prompts, participants will write a poetic letter to these landscapes, weaving impressions from the film with memories that are close and intimate. The workshop aims to activate imagination, memory and empathy as ways of creating internal and shared spaces for healing, protection and recovery from trauma — and reconnecting with the cycle of life.
The evening will conclude with a contextualising talk by Dr Darya Tsymbaluk (University of Chicago), author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press 2025), followed by a discussion that brings the film, writing, and wider political context into conversation.
The event is organised by Dr Dorota Ostrowska, Senior Lecturer in Film and Modern Media, at Birkbeck, University of London.
The event is supported by Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) and Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre
Contact name: External Relations Events
Speakers-
Darya Tsymbaluk
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Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. Darya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity, 2025). You can learn more about her work here: https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/
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Hanna Komar
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Hanna Komar is a Belarusian poet, translator, writer.
Hanna’s poetic work lays bare the experience of being a girl, then a young woman, growing up in a strongly patriarchal authoritarian country.She has published five poetry collections: “Страх вышыні” [Fear of Heights, a collection of docu poetry “Мы вернемся” [We’ll Return and “Вызвалі або бяжы” [Set Me Free or Run in Belarusian, as well as a bilingual collections, Recycled and Ribwort, and a non-fiction book "Калі я выйду на волю" [When I'm Out of Here.
Her work has been translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Czech, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Danish, Italian and Russian. She translates her work into English.
She is a member of PEN Belarus and an honorary member of English PEN. Freedom of Speech 2020 Prize laureate from the Norwegian Authors’ Union.
Hanna has an MA in Creative Writing: Writing the City from the University of Westminster. She is taking a PhD at the University of Brighton, exploring how poetry can support Belarusian women to share experiences of gender-based violence and patriarchy.
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