Sunday was a very beautiful day in Los Angeles, hot and summery, but everyone should have been at this screening of ‘Pussy vs. Putin’ at the Harmony Gold Theater organized by Cinema for Peace (and advertised by Girlie Action). Yes, everyone should have dropped their beach trip and other Runyon canyon hiking plan, because Masha Alekhina and Nadya Tolokonnonikova, founding members of the art collective Pussy Riot, were present after the movie for a Q&A. I exactly did that, stopped what I was doing, and drove west on Sunset to have the chance to see these two women. Can you think about anyone braver than these women? Can you think about actions punkier than what they did? They endured two years of Russian jails, were beaten and maltreated but are still standing strong, more determined than ever to speak in the name of justice.
The documentary shows a lot of pirate footage of the female band hijacking the public transportations in Moscow, a bus roof, a platform in the subway, screaming their anti-Putin anthems while wearing their bright multicolor dresses and famous baklavas! You see Russians laughing, applauding, ignoring them, taking their smart phones out just like anywhere in the US, but it always ends up with the police arresting them for troubling the order. The whole documentary puts you in the middle of the action, there is nothing fancy about this, it looks like a collage of footage taken by people in the streets, or Nadya’s husband often there too with his camera, but most of the time the camera is shaky, as if the person who was shooting, was also pushed around or brutalized by the police. There is no comment, no explanation, no voice-over, they let you in the middle of the debacle, listening to some random pedestrians commenting the spectacle and trying to figure out what’s going on.
It looks like that the police is omnipresent in Russia, any street protest, even the smallest one chanting about the elections being a farce, brings them very rapidly on the spot. But nothing stops the Pussy Riot women who even perform in front of St Basil’s Cathedral on the Red Square, wearing sleeveless dresses in the snow,… only for this they should deserve a price. Pussy Riot oppose Putin’s authoritarianism but above everything they are feminist, repeatedly calling Putin a ‘sexist’.
The Riot girls even erupted on stage at a Faith No More concert in Moscow – at the Californian band’s approval of course – and the movie includes some amateur footage of Madonna revealing her ‘Pussy Riot’ Sharpie tattoo in her back during a concert in Moscow. Pussy Riot are famous, they are media hyped, have the support of the rock stars, but this is for a very good reason this time.
However, some footage of pedestrians passing by without even looking at an improvised street-show reveals that indifference is one of Pussy Riot’s enemies, indifference and the church! It’s clear that after their anti-Putin performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Orthodox people became the enemy. Although this led to their 2-year imprisonment, this performance was just amazingly comical, a colorful spectacle of girls dressed up in blue-red-yellow-green-purple, screaming their rage in the middle of this orthodox gold and kitsch decorum, while nuns were trying to stop them. The religious zealots never forgave them for dancing in the church, in particular the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), whose certain members look like a cross between the Hell’s Angels and an Orthodox patriarch, wearing ‘Orthodoxy or death’ black shirts and baptizing the street protestors with large bowls of water. Even arrested, the Pussy Riot girls resist and argue, they never give up, but everyone in Russia curiously brandishes a law book at any time, quoting some law article number to back up any argument… a strange Kafkaian side of Russia… Nadya and Masha were sent for two years in a cold penal colony in Siberia, which is also the subject of a short story by Kafka.
Unlike the documentary ‘Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer’, we don’t see much of the trial, this is different, it lets you the judge, and allows you to listen to the conversation between random people in the street, whether they are behind these religious zealots or are asking for a revolt screaming ‘it is the inquisition’.
As promised, Masha and Nadya came for a Q&A after the movie, looking really pretty, and getting most of what was said but still answering in Russian while Nadya’s husband was translating their answers in English. They talked about the oppressive Putin’s government, harassing gay people with this new movement ‘Occupy pedophilia’ linking homosexuality to pedophilia and allowing violence against the LGBT community. They also said being hopeful about the recent Ukraine revolt, but they talked a lot bout the terrible conditions in Russian prisons where people are treated as slaves with awful sanitary conditions, and discussed their hunger strike to obtain change.
Someone asked an interesting question about the US prisons, saying that, despite being in a liberal country, our system is as harsh as Russia’s, putting in jail African American mostly for drug related crimes. But Nadya and Masha said they have already visited one prison in the US and have the intention to visit more. They announced last month the opening of Zona Prava (Law Zone) in Mordovia, their newly created prisoners’ rights NGO whose objective is to combat abuse that takes place inside cells.
I exited the theater just amazed by these extraordinary young women, who said that their political engagement came naturally when they were very young. It is so rare to have such a social and political consciousness at such a young age, most people are asleep and too busy with their own life to even care. But when is the job done? asked a woman in the crowd. The Pussy Riot girls said they will never see the job done, but they see small victories, as what they did for this penal colony, and this is what matters.
More pictures of Nadya and Masha here.
