At the Inaugural Annabelle Sreberny Distinguished Lecture, Anikó Imre Explored the Intersection Between Fantasy, Storytelling, and Politics in Eastern Europe

When scholars at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication decided to launch a named lecture, one person quickly came to mind, says CARGC Director Aswin Punathambekar. “We wanted someone whose life and work spoke to our feminist, decolonial, and transnational commitments. Professor Annabelle Sreberny was that figure.”

For four decades, Sreberny, one of the founding members and the first Chair of the Center for Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, studied globalization and communication with close attention to digital communication and Iran. “Her research was informed by her total commitment to equality and social justice, focusing on media and processes of social and political change and democratization in the Global South,” Punathambekar says.

It was fitting, then, that the first Annabelle Sreberny Lecture was delivered by Anikó Imre, Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, whose work on Eastern European media industries and culture has been inspired by Sreberny’s scholarship.

“Sreberny’s work was formative for me when I was defining myself as a student and then a scholar,” Imre told the audience at the lecture. “I benefited from her distinct feminist vision oriented towards coloniality, post-coloniality, and social justice in those post-Cold War years of large-scale global rearrangement.”

Imre’s lecture explored how storytelling shapes politics and media economies, particularly in illiberal, populist states in Eastern Europe. “We’re living through a seismic shift in world order,” she said, “where facts have given way to conspiracy universes and mythic narratives that fulfill deep emotional needs.” These regimes use narrative and myth to maintain legitimacy and thrive on what she calls “political worldbuilding” — the creation of fantasy worlds that promise safety and belonging while masking deep inequalities. 

“Rather than appealing to rationality, populist leaders spread simple, mythical stories that appeal to fundamental fantasy needs,” Imre told the audience. “These are stories of a past national glory, located in a mythical golden age where harmony is lost and needs to be re-established.”

Eastern Europe’s Semi-Peripheral Fantasies

Borrowing from world-systems theory, Imre described Eastern Europe as “semi-peripheral” — caught between the economic and cultural “core” of Western Europe and the “periphery” of the Global South. Eastern Europe is neither dominant nor subordinate, but perpetually in between: modern yet nostalgic, white yet “not quite Western,” politically European but economically dependent on the West.

As a scholar of film and television, Imre links this semi-peripherality to the region’s place in the global entertainment economy. Countries such as Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic have become major service hubs for Hollywood and streaming platforms, she said, offering cheap labor, tax incentives, and scenic landscapes. In recent films and TV series, Eastern European capitals have doubled for Berlin, Moscow, London, Rome, and even Buenos Aires.

“Hungary currently leads media production in all of continental Europe,” Imre pointed out. “Nearly a billion dollars per year is being spent on film production in the country, and over 90% of this investment comes from multinational media conglomerates headquartered in the United States.”

Through two case studies — Ari Aster’s film “Midsommar” and Netflix’s television series “The Witcher” — Imre explored how Eastern Europe’s role as a low-cost production hub mirrors its political role as the West’s “other Europe.”

Few viewers realize that “Midsommar,” the 2019 horror film celebrated for its bright, Nordic imagery and eerie critique of white nationalism, was shot in Hungary, where the “Swedish” village was built from scratch. The decision was not aesthetic but economic, Irme said: the production relocated to circumvent Swedish labor protections and take advantage of Hungary’s tax incentives and lax labor regulations.“This hidden, deep, politicized detail takes us to the political-economic underbelly of racial capitalism, where the region of Eastern Europe continues to provide laundering services for the international media industries themselves and for white European nationalism,” she said.

Her second example, “The Witcher,” traces a different circuit of exchange between local culture and global media empires. Originally a book series written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski and popularized through video games created by a Polish studio, “The Witcher” became a Netflix streaming “original” — a rebranded property now filmed primarily in Budapest and marketed worldwide. Imre called this a case of “platform imperialism,” where global streaming corporations buy regional intellectual property, extract its cultural value, and circulate it under their own banner. 

Together, “Midsommar” and “The Witcher” reveal how fantasy is not only the genre that dominates regional production, but also the ideological foundation that links politics, culture, and capital, Imre observed. “Not only can an oppressive national media environment coexist with a state-supported infrastructure built to produce borderless fantasy entertainment,” she said, “but political fantasy can actually substitute for democratic participation domestically.”

Imre closed the lecture with a reference to Annabelle Sreberny’s legacy of transnational scholarship. To confront the global rise of authoritarian storytelling, she argued, media scholars must adopt the same broad and critical vision Sreberny championed: “We must see a liberal nationalism and liberal service production, in this case in Eastern Europe, not as opposing or even parallel developments, but as mutually reinforcing phenomena.”