In the decades since Ukraine gained independence, music has played a vital role in shaping and expressing a modern sense of national identity. This has been especially visible in the creative ways artists have drawn from the country’s folk traditions—adapting village songs, instruments, and motifs into new genres that resonate with contemporary audiences. Whether through […]
The USSR did its best to control culture and make it serve the needs of the state. However, culture, like life itself, finds a way of spreading, evolving, and surviving, often against all odds. Rock music had, by the 60s and 70s, become a cultural phenomenon in Europe and America and its spread to the […]
Filip Lato is a young Polish musician based out of Warsaw. In his childhood, Filip attended the Secondary Music School in Warsaw, but interrupted his education there in order to attend a traditional school to graduate. He continued to play music as he went through university and law school and even after he became a […]
Born to an ethnically Polish family living in a small town in the Czech Republic, Ewa Farna attended first a Polish elementary school and then a separate art school for five years as a child in Česky Tešin, a town in the Czech Republic, where she also attended a dance school and first learned how […]
Born in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Southern Poland, Dawid Podsiadło was the winner of Poland’s second X Factor contest. In 2010, he created an alternative rock band with his friends called Curly Heads in their hometown of Dąbrowa Górnicza. At first, the band only performed for each other, constantly practicing every moment they could get; then they […]
Fyodor Bondarchuk is one of Russia’s best-known film industry professionals, known for his acting, directing, and producing. Most of his films are action films – and many are sponsored, in part, by the Russian state. Born to famous Soviet actress Irina Skobtseva and Academy Award winner Sergei Bondarchuk, Fyodor Bondarchuk (Фёдор Сергeевич Бондарчyк) grew up […]
