Writer-Director Darya Zhuk’s debut film Crystal Swan (2018) centers around Velya, a young woman seeking to escape the miserable conformity of life in Belarus in 1996. Velya is an aspiring DJ whose house music provides some much-needed escapism, but like many others her age she dreams of fleeing to America—or perhaps more accurately, a fantasy America where every teen has their own bedroom and cell phone and parents knock before they enter. That’s not Velya’s life in Minsk, where she must contend with an overbearing mother, little money, few job prospects, and the general post-communism malaise.

In this “tragic comedy” Velya schemes to obtain a visa from the American embassy, which involves faking a work phone number and other machinations. Velya learns to her dismay that the embassy intends to call that number to verify her employment and other details. Through a series of misadventures she ends up spending the next two days with the dysfunctional family that actually owns the telephone number, trying to convince them to lie for her when the embassy calls. As you might expect, the presence of a weird girl from Minsk trying to use the family so she can flee to Chicago leads to an increasing number of complications, not all of them comic.

In the best tradition of Eastern European literature and cinema, Zhuk tells a tale of desolate realism colored by farcical and absurdist elements (think Good Soldier Svejk or Milos Forman). Her film is set at a time of turmoil in Belarus, as the fledgling post-Soviet democracy succumbed to dictatorship. This ethos is mirrored in Zhuk’s protagonist, a young woman faced with a bleak future if she doesn’t make a run for it, and quickly. In telling her story Crystal Swan makes astute use of mid-1990s iconography; pre-digital cameras and phones (including phone booths), large posters on teenagers’ walls, cassette mix tapes handed from person to person, VHS tapes that jam in the VCR, and a pervasive, almost repressive, sense of materiality. It’s as if the accumulation of mundane objects provides an antidote to the wretchedness of everyday life. When these objects break down or lose their allure our heroine is forced to seize other possibilities.

As the film charts its course from the ironies and absurdities of the opening scenes to a bracing grittiness, it makes no guarantees for Velya’s successful escape nor for her happiness if she does. Darya Zhuk made her own successful escape and is now based in New York City, where she attended Columbia University, and Crystal Swan reflects memories of her own immigrant hopes as inextricably mingled with the uncertainties of forging a new life in a strange country.

Watch Crystal Swan Director Darya Zhuk.

The global economy has been ravaged by a significant decline in consumption, leading to a challenging business environment. Some companies are struggling to survive while others are taking advantage of new opportunities. What are senior industry leaders seeing from their perspective?

To understand this environment, this exclusive series of webinars from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management features panels of prominent executives and alumni who share career insights and experiences as well as their outlook in key business fields, such as finance, technology, business development and supply chain logistics.

Browse more programs in UC Davis Graduate School of Management’s Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

Scripps climate scientist Yassir Eddebbar takes you on an exploration of the ocean’s interior to reveal a fascinating phenomenon – oxygen minimum zones (OMZs).

Oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) are regions of the global ocean that present low dissolved oxygen concentrations. Although they represent only a small fraction of the global ocean volume, they are considered to be an important sink for fixed nitrogen, contributing 30-50% of the oceanic nitrogen removal. They are important sources of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O), the latter also involved in the destruction of stratospheric ozone.

Focusing on his work in the tropical Pacific, Eddebbar explains what causes OMZs, how they are likely to change in response to climate change, and their potential to impact marine ecosystems and fisheries as climate warms.

Watch Oceans Out of Breath: Oxygen Minimum Zones in a Warming Climate.

The United States has seen nationwide protests for weeks over the deaths of Black people at the hands of the police, and the frustration that racism and racial inequality still persist throughout modern American life.

Leading scholars and #1 Best Sellers, Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility) and Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be An Anti-Racist) participated in a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery to discuss persistent racism in our society.

This wide-ranging conversation tackles important questions: How do we talk about race in a way that unites and strengthens us as a community? How do we get beyond our superficial differences and see ourselves as one and the same, with our multiple enriching individualities, with more in common than not, yet with our same basic needs and emotions and hopes and dreams?

This event is presented by the National Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC). Their mission is to help resolve conflicts at all levels of society.

Watch A Path Forward: Empowering People, Transforming Cultures.

Blending movie genres can be a tricky business, one often as not doomed to failure. Combining horror and comedy is especially fraught, since the two genres would seem to be mutually exclusive if not diametrically opposed in tone & subject matter. A few brave filmmakers have forged ahead regardless, including Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the screenwriters behind the sleeper hit Zombieland (2009).

Successful genre-bending is not something that can be tackled haphazardly. In conversation with UC Santa Barbara Pollock Theater Director Matt Ryan the duo discuss the many considerations that go into fashioning such a script, including finding the right horror/comedy balance while honoring the audience’s unavoidable genre expectations. As with any screenplay it’s a matter of making good decisions along the way; for example, Reese and Wernick determined at the outset that their zombies would be the fast-moving kind, a la 28 Days Later, and not the shambling variety popularized by Night of the Living Dead. They also elected to begin their tale with the zombie apocalypse well under way and almost taken for granted by our intrepid heroes. Subsequently there’s very little exposition about cause and scope to slow the pacing. As the writers note, it’s really not relevant to their story.

Reese and Wernick stress that having the right cast is absolutely vital to any film’s success, since if the actors are right for their roles they can boost the script to another level (and if not, it’s a train wreck). Fortunately the Zombieland cast includes such stalwarts as Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, and the near-legendary Bill Murray, all experienced and adept at playing comedy and drama with equal aplomb. (And in case you were wondering, yes, Bill Murray is very much the same personality off-screen as on.) The scripters were able to do some re-writing as needed to suit the actors’ personas, which in their view made the director’s job a little easier and enhanced the final result.

Track down Zombieland, and then tune into this installment of Script to Screen. You’ll be entertained and hopefully better prepared for World War Z, if and when…

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