Dis(b)ordered Lives Decolonial Temporalities and Borderland Identities in Latvian and Lithuanian Documentary Film

Abstract

This article theorizes “border(land) time” through two post- Soviet Bal-tic borderlands— the eastern Latvian region of Latgale and the Lithuanian nuclear city of Visaginas— as a historically produced, embodied temporality that emerges in the interstices between national and imperial regimes of time and history. Bringing decolonial approaches to temporality into dialogue with post- Soviet cultural studies, the article conceptualizes border(land) time through four temporal dimensions: entanglement, recursion, ritualization, and slowness. In my close readings of two documentary films— Dāvis Sīmanis’s Mūris (D Is for Division, 2018) and Olga Černovaitė’s Drugelio miestas (Butterfly City, 2017)— I treat documentary cinema as a temporal archive that renders lived experiences of time legible. In Latgale, border(land) time is shaped by securitization and anticipatory violence; in Visaginas, it surfaces through nuclear decommissioning and the collapse of Soviet futurity. The article ultimately reframes Baltic borderlands as laboratories of plural temporalities in the long aftermath of empire and under wartime conditions since 2014.