In 1989 popular revolutions exploded across Eastern Europe, bringing an end to the socialist state system in the region. Without doubt, no other region has embraced the adoption of neoliberal policies as enthusiastically as the postsocialist states (Appel and Orenstein 2016). Yet three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe still faces severe economic problems. The rapid sociopolitical changes and the transformation of the welfare system brought about mass unemployment, a crisis of sovereign debt and various forms of austerity packages that all exposed the economies of European post-socialist countries. The hardship of the transformation from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism was further intensified by the 2007–08 global financial crisis that put the region at the centre of economic recession (Kattel 2010). In view of this it is not surprising that, being disappointed by the post-1989 neoliberal reforms – with relatively little chance of reaching Western development levels (Kornai 2006; Kattel 2010) – the region entered the age of what Boyer (2012: 19) defines as nostomania– a desire to recapture the old socialist way of life.

This chapter investigates patterns of neoliberal crisis in contemporary Eastern European cinema. By positing a post-2010 Eastern European narrative structure called the ‘double form of neoliberal subjugation’, this essay examines the heavily gendered visual formations through selected case studies. Dissecting four films from four different Eastern European countries – the Slovenian Damjan Kozole's Slovenka (A Call Girl, 2009), the Romanian Ruxana Zenide's Ryna (2005), the Czech Matěj Chlupáček and Michal Samir's Bez doteku (Touchless, 2013) and the Hungarian Szabolcs Hajdu's Bibliothèque Pascal (2010) – the study sets up a visual-narrative analysis of neoliberal (self-)colonisation. It argues that, along with the nostomanic resurrection of the socialist male figure, there is a tendency in the region's cinema to feature Western male figures as powerful, authoritative and often violent characters who exploit Eastern European women by sexual trafficking and/or other forms of corporeal violence that render these females obedient to them.

It must be stated that, as diversified as the Eastern European sociopolitical and economic transformation was between 1989 and 1991, equally as different are the faces that the current neoliberal structures and crises display in the region.