in zombie fire — jeannakolesova

Speculative Documentary
35:47 min
Black and White
Stereo Sound
Russian, Chuvash, Tatar, English spoken languages
English Subtitles

Director: Jeanna Kolesova
Writers: Wren Bisley, Jeanna Kolesova
Producer: Sam W. Harper, Jeanna Kolesova
Cast: Anisa Nadeeva, Victoriia Saltar, NN
Director of Photography: Valentin Müri
Sound Recording and Sound Design: Georgii Malykh
Production Assistant: Merve Cansiz
Interview Recordist: Elena M.
Former Peat Workers: Nadezhda P., Nataliia V.
Voice Actors: Maksim Avdeev, Jeanna Kolesova
Background Cast: Wren Bisley, Jeanna Kolesova, Merve Cansiz
Editing, 3D Scenes, VFX: Jeanna Kolesova

3D Models: Amir Mamin, Y9J, A.zo0mika, Medhue, Paul N, Francesco Coldesina, Deelus, Megascans, Volodymyr Stepaniuk, Radik Bilalov
Translator Tatar: Elza Nabiullina
Translator Chuvash: NN
Drone Footage: LaFlora (used with permission)
Found Footage: Alexey Kalinin, BBC Earth (source YouTube)
Sound: klankbeeld, TechspiredMinds, eliasheuninck
Illustration: Avlachi

Archival Materials: TASS photo chronicle, National Audiovisual Institute of Helsinki, Central Studio for Documentary Films (CSDF), State Archive of Film and Photo Documents (RGAKFD)

Music: Birch Tree, Composer Mark Fradkin, Performed by Izabella Yuryeva; Masha the Brigade Leader, Composer Modest Tabachnikov, Performed by Izabella Yuryeva; Harvest Celebration, Composer Fyodor Martynov, Performed by Izabella Yuryeva; 1950; State Television and Radio Fund (Gosteleradiofond)

Source Material: Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy, Katja Bruisch, 2025

Spetial thanks: Alexandra Bikhtimorova, Andrei Siclodi †, Dāvis Bušs, Ekaterina Selenkina, Elisa Jule Braun, Hans Joosten, Katja Bruisch, Laura Nitsch, Lena Kocutar, Mariam Aslanishvili, Polina Osipova, Susa Husse, Tilman Fries, Wolfgang Siederer

Research supported by
Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship
Sensing Peat

Produced at Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen within the framework of the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory

Three Soviet peat workers endure the brutal routine of extraction with unmet quotas, cold barracks, and the constant threat of injury or death. Their real confrontation begins when a Spirit of a drained swamp approaches them. As the land reveals its suppressed memory, the women must decide: Will they remain cogs in the machine, or forge an alliance with the landscape?

Jeanna Kolesova’s experimental documentary In Zombie Fire (2026) is the first chapter of an ongoing trilogy examining European peatlands as ecological, political, and cultural witnesses to histories of extraction, environmental violence, and imperial transformation. Shot in black and white and moving between speculative fiction, archival research, and experimental documentary, the film approaches wetlands as living archives—terrains in which political ideologies, economic infrastructures, and embodied labour have left lasting marks. Spanning sites across the European Part of the Soviet Union, In Zombie Fire traces how peatlands have been repeatedly transformed in the service of energy production, agricultural expansion, and state-building, while asking how these landscapes continue to shape the present.

Peatlands occupy a paradoxical place within European environmental imaginaries. For centuries, bogs and marshes were framed as unproductive wastelands—territories to be drained, cultivated, industrialized, or militarily secured. Peat is the dense, carbon-rich layer of partially decomposed plant matter that accumulates over thousands of years in waterlogged ground, making peatlands among the largest natural carbon stores on earth. Under Soviet modernization, peat became an especially important fuel source, and wetland extraction was tied to broader projects of electrification, industrial labour, and territorial control. Draining bogs promised progress, productivity, and conquest over ‘wild’ nature. Yet these infrastructures of extraction were never only technological; they were deeply gendered. Women from rural areas—among the most economically and socially disadvantaged—were recruited into physically brutal peat labour, their bodies integrated into systems of production that mirrored broader ideological demands around socialist labour, reproduction, and collective sacrifice. In Kolesova’s film, the gendered body becomes a central site through which these histories of environmental transformation and political violence are made legible.

At the centre of the film are three peat workers, exhausted by repetitive labour and the dehumanizing rhythms of extraction. Moving through drained wetlands, industrial ruins, and unstable terrain, they encounter an uncanny presence in the bog: the Swamp Spirit, a speculative entity developed by the artist to embody memory, loss, and ecological resilience. Neither ghost nor mythological creature in a conventional sense, the Spirit emerges as a more-than-human witness—a testimony of the landscape memory against the violence of national hegemonic history. Through this encounter, the workers are confronted with a revelation: their labour has not only transformed the land, but has also implicated their bodies within this landscape—infrastructures of extractive conquest. The film’s central tension emerges here—between complicity and refusal, between inherited systems of violence and the possibility of aligning with other forms of life.

The title refers to the phenomenon of ‘zombie fires’—peat fires that continue smouldering underground for months, sometimes surviving entire winters before reigniting on the surface. Kolesova invokes this ecological phenomenon as a political metaphor. Just as peat can retain heat and combustion beneath layers of soil, histories of extraction, imperial ideology, and environmental violence persist beneath contemporary narratives of sustainability, energy transition, and restoration. Today, peatlands are increasingly recast as ‘carbon sinks’, ‘climate superheroes’, or even strategic natural barriers in times of military conflict. Yet the film suggests that such narratives often leave unresolved the deeper histories embedded in these landscapes: colonial land management, industrial exploitation, gendered labour, and the afterlives of state violence.

Rather than offering a documentary account of ecological restoration, In Zombie Fire inhabits the unstable territory between myth, political memory, and environmental testimony. Through the figure of the Swamp Spirit, the film asks what landscapes remember, what histories continue to smoulder beneath official narratives, and what forms of solidarity might emerge when the human is no longer positioned at the centre of ecological history.

Barbara Mahlknecht, 2026

Index