January, 2025

Currently in Film Festival Circuit

A claustrophobic expedition into the hauntological heart of darkness, my short “Tomorrow Was War” presents a dystopian Russian police state. Following a transgender man, Shura, clad in white Adidas and hiding his surgery scars under a windbreaker, the film jumps between then and now, color and black-and-white, imagined scenarios and auto-fiction. The film is set on a New Year’s Eve somewhere in 202? when we witness Shura’s psychological unravelling after two police officers barge into his provincial Russian apartment.

Short film directed by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina

Cinematography by mikey baratta

Sound Design by Eleanor Jones

Production Design by Winnie Wine

Sound Mixing by Alí Meyer

Starring Nicodemus Cor Leonis, MJ Cabigting-Steele, Olga Kravtsova, Valentina Zaitseva

Features art work by Free Soul Bassibet, Afroditi Psarra, James William Blake, Ren Han, Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, Esteban Agosin & Tivon Rice

August, 2023

A short film by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina

Cinematography by mikey baratta

Online

“Caretaker” follows a specter that took an unconventional artist residency in a school of art. It is both — an intimate study of a superfluous man stuck in the academic setting like a ghost to its haunt throughout the series of endless nights; and a topographic portrait of the institution as shelter. This short film marries Chantel Akerman’s forlorn minimalism of “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels” and the side-splitting mania of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” presenting a fleshy ghost story against the backdrop of an American university.

Following Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: ‘haunt’ signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it. The OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word ‘haunt’ as ‘to provide with a home, house’..

and, of course, after Kubrick’s The Shining: I’m sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.

Get out your handkerchiefs — home is where the haunt is.

August, 2023

Video Art created by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina

Cinematography by mikey barrata

Online

“Naughty Dirty Bits” is a video pairing that is half instructional manual on how to make your very own DIY hormones and half a decadent cooking tutorial. The two videos — each following the steps of making Testosterone and Estradiol, are in conversation with each other — flirt with the idea of art as activism, and insist on the concept of politics serving as the arena of invention and creativity.

In the year of 2023 when 566 anti-trans bills have been introduced in the USA, and hormone replacement therapy has been banned all together in the artist’s home country of Russia, the need to take your medical alterations into your own hands is especially searing for the global trans community.

These videos are not just decadent tutorials on how to create dishes of your own choosing, but a plea to both trans- and cis- communities to wake up to the stringent hierarchies of medical system, the panopticon control of the state over our biology. The plea to spearhead this molecular uprising and to take the reality of our bodies into own hands.

January, 2025

Short Documentary created by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina together with Mars

Composer: Otto

Distributed by RAINA Films

Currently in Film Festival Circuit

No Refunds is a visceral, tangled descent into the transactional dynamics of intimate encounters, told through the language of bodies, sheets, and reflections, where the purchase of queer sex work is laid bare. As the filmmaker simultaneously takes on the roles of client and audience, the boundaries between documentary and performance fade, unraveling the artifice at the heart of sex work and the act of filmmaking. 

May, 2022

Short Film created by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Currently in Post-Production

Short film “Rape” is a sadomodernist investigation into forensics of PTSD that follows incestual sexual violence through filmmaking techniques while dissecting ideas of “watching” and “surveilling” in the meta-commentary of violence as entertainment for the audience.

February, 2023

Video Art created by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Online

A hallucinogenic video, “The Gospel According to St. Vladimir”, is a product of reading multitudes of Vladimir Putin’s speeches, writing a biblical text pseudo-created by him and feeding it to the Visions of Chaos AI program. AI conjured a borderless, feverish Russia, impregnated with contagious Christianity, mutated children and maimed illuminati gods.

May, 2022

Video Art directed and shot by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

“Pretty Soldiers Pretty Flames” is a direct commentary on Russian invasion and genocide in Ukraine. Adamska ties fascism and colonialism of two empires — Russia and the USA while fusing their iconographies — burning Russian military artefacts such as a Second World War poster and a sweater worn by a famed Russian movie war anti-hero while standing by the American flag and posing as the Statue of Liberty, the artist inter-splices it with the interviews of Russian soldiers calling their wives and mothers and admitting war crimes they are committing in Ukraine.

October, 2020

Short Film co-directed and associate produced by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Currently in the Film Festival Circuit

Set in a working-class suburb in Georgia, the film is a naturalistic portrait that follows an ordinary young woman, Erin, as she struggles to socially adjust after abandoning her dog, Polly, following a tragic sexual assault.

Directors: Elizabeth Rakhilkina & Angwei Deng

Writer: Angwei Deng

Producer: Jeremy Truong

CInematographer: Chiao Chen

Production Designer: Alexah Acuña

Editor: Angwei Deng

Sound Designer: Matthew Ericson

Color Correction Artist: Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

Starring Arielle Goldman & Kyle Cameron

October, 2020

Short Film written, directed & co-produced by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Currently in Festival Circuit

Best Short Film Award at LGBTQ+ Toronto Film Festival
Best LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award at Sappho Film Festival
Best LGBT Film Nominee at Mabig Film Festival
Honorable Mention at Tokyo International Short Film Festival and New Wave Short Film Festival
Official Selection at Wicked Queer: Boston's LGBTQ Film Festival, Oregon Scream Week Horror Film Festival, Berlin Flash Film Festival, Arc Film Festival, Rio LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, Lesflicks Cinema at LFEST, HIVE: International Neukölln Short Film Days, PrideFlix

A lesbian reverie set amidst the backwoods of New England, New Flesh for the Old Ceremony explores the physicality of grief through a macabre fable about a woman whose wife is devoured by and then possesses their beloved pack of dogs.

Starring Ana Maria Jomolca, LeeAnne Hutchison and Catherine Curtin

Producer: Lecia Ductan
Executive Producer: Alexander Rakhilkin
1st AD: Samson Jeter
Editor: Jo Shaffer & Morgan Gu
Production Designer: Sarah Moskowitz
Colorist: Alexia Salingaros
1st AC: Joey Fong-Lamboy
2nd AC: Emmet Luciano
Art PA: Olivia Krueger
Gaffer: Vadim Goldenberg
Key Grip: Jeremy Liguori
Grip: Miles Quinn
Grip: Daniel Sachun
Script Superviser: Alisa Traskunov
Line Producer: Matthew Ericson
Sound Operator: Iris Liu
HMU: Anastasia Samoylova
UPM: John Chiodi
Production Coordinator: Aja Evans
PA: Aleka Agre
PA: Carolina Zeitune
Media Managers: Maurice Wright & Bailey Oliver
Swing: Austin Price

Dogs featured in the film: Eliza, Annie, Dannie, Fender & Milo

2017-2021

Several lack & white experimental vignettes telling the macabre stories of isolation, sexual and gender anxiety, and yearning are written, directed & produced by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

April, 2018

Music video directed by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina to the song by the Nashville-based band The American Buffalo.

https://theamericanbuffalo.bandcamp.com/releases

Producer: Jenny He

Cinematographer: Artemiy Repin

Editor: Morgan Gu

Starring Josh Edward & Djouliet Amara

April, 2018

Commercial for a fashion Brooklyn-based store Zero Waste Daniel, where clothing is made entirely from reroll, written, directed & produced by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Cinematographer: John Zeng

Composer: Noah Davis

Editor: Morgan Gu

Models: Charlie Nishimura & Lio Mehiel

April 2018

https://zerowastedaniel.com/

May, 2017

A Short Film written, directed & produced by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Available online

Official selection of Trinity Film Festival, InShort Film Festival, Eve’s Ribs Film Festival

A woman has to face a sexually aggressive intruder and decide what role in his perverse game she is going to take.

Starring Marian Edmiston & Tim Torre

Cinematographer: Artemiy Repin
1st AD: Shani Tsur
Editor: Morgan Gu
Sound Mixer: Kyle Goings
Boom Operator: Vanneeda Keowmang
Sound Design: Juan Quimper

Special thanks to Anton Sorin, Edoardo Vitaletti and John Gurrin

November, 2017

A short film written & directed by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Available online

Best Female Filmmaker Award Winner at Moscow Indie Film Festival

A screen adaptation of a story by Anton Chekhov about an immigrant babysitter who falls into a delirious maelstrom induced by her sleep-deprived, sacrificial lifestyle.

Starring Laura Arten, Rebekah Madebach, Steve Fogelman, Kat Harley, Gregory Gelfand, Michael Jared Thomas, Yuri Yakor and Lena Lipavsky

Producer & Cinematographer: Konstantin Lyubimov
Editor: Joshua Dephew
1st AD: Arturo Alanis Garza
Animation Designer: Coraline Yijie Wang
Production Designer: Nisa Neza
Costume Designer: Zuzia Czemier
Gaffer: Sam Wolff
Key Grip: Greg Vogel
2nd AC: Jeremi Luguori
Script Superviser: Alisa Traskunov
Sound Mixers: Juan Quimper and Sophia Huebschman
Sound Designer: Judith Moy
Composer: Ching-Shan Chang
ADR & Foley Designer: Roman Fusco
Color Correction Artist: Jeremy Liguori
VFX Artist: Josh Kane

Special Thanks to Alexander Rakhilkin, Konstantin Lyubimov, Jo Schaffer, Laura Arten and Matthew Ericson

December, 2015

Short Animation written, co-directed & co-drawn by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina.

Co-director & co-animator — Charlotte De Bekker https://www.charlottedebekker.com/

Music by the band The Corn Thieves