SWANBACK is a short 16mm film that blends fictional and documentary narratives exploring how the symbol of the swan – associated with truth, purity and aristocracy – has been used to strengthen the structures of oppression in people’s lives and upon their bodies in both British and Russian imperialist contexts.

The film portrays a fictional character, played by former classical ballet dancer Oliver Connew, partially based on interviews with members of the Lithuanian community, who illegally migrated to work in the UK before Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004. The film also responds to an infamous article printed in The Sun newspaper in 2003 about Eastern European migrants entitled, ‘Swan Bake: Asylum seekers steal the Queen’s birds for barbecues’. SWANBACK’s diaristic narrative retells homo-sovieticus’ – to paraphrase writer Svetlana Alexievich’s pejorative term for an average conformist person in the Soviet Union – journey as an illegal economic migrant to the UK where he gets accused of killing and eating the royal swans. 

The camera follows Connew in the dance studio as he attempts to learn from the 1963 video recording of ‘Prince’s solo. Act I’ from Swan Lake (1875-76) by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with the highly acclaimed dancer Rudolph Nureyev as Prince Siegfried. A production of Swan Lake was repeatedly shown on TV during the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev during the fall of the Soviet Union, forever connecting the ballet to political upheaval.

In SWANBACK the tale of the illegal immigrant merges with Connew’s personal journey from ballet to semantic dance while overcoming the violence of the imperially constructed art of ballet instilled within his body. Instead of choosing to respond to the violence of ballet altering his body with the violence of amnesia altering his memory, he decides to accept the scars that ballet left upon him. 

Produced by Rūta Kiaupaitė, Baltic Productions

Featuring Oliver Connew

Cinematographer Nojus Drąsutis

Composers Shakeeb Abu Hamdan and Sholto Dobie

Sound Designer Kipras Čėsna

Colourist Justinas Vencius

Editor Jonas Juškaitis

SWANBACK (2023) 14 min 30 s

Exhibited at David Dale (2023), Glasgow; Centralla (2024/2025) Birmingham.