Queendom has won a raft of prizes since its world premiere at SXSW 2023, including the Next Wave Award at CPH:DOX. Now, the story of Gena Marvin, a queer performance artist who protests on the streets of Moscow (not least about the invasion of Ukraine) is squarely in the frame for Oscar consideration. The film is produced by Igor Myakotin (Welcome to Chechnya) together with director Agniia Galdanova.
“Public performance has to irritate,’ says Galdanova of her subject. “It has to leave you with more questions than you had before and it has to be uncomfortable, both for people who are watching and also for the performer.”
Twenty-one-year-old Gennadiy Chebotarev, otherwise known as Gena, causes controversy wherever she goes. In a life dedicated to shape-changing performance, she brazenly challenges the brutal machismo of Putin’s homophobic regime. Deemed to be too controversial even for Moscow’s drag scene, Gena will crawl the length of a metro train in full alien regalia, or strut her stuff without fear among soldiers celebrating Paratroopers Day. Even when she goes shopping in a mall she is asked to leave by security guards who accuse her of disturbing the peace. This doesn’t stop people filming her wherever she goes, all part of a life shaped by the need to perform.
But Gena/Gennadiy is not from Moscow – she is only there to study. An orphan, she was brought up by her grandparents in the gulag town of Magadan, eight hours flight from the Russian capital, and where she caused equal consternation among the locals. There, she has a fraught relationship with her grandfather, who cannot fathom her performative tendencies, nor her inability to remain in university. Nor indeed her unwillingness to join the military. “Just like your mother, you’ll die on the streets,” he tells her.
Midway through the film, Russia invades Ukraine which leads to mass protests on the streets of Moscow. These are illegal, as indeed is the public promotion of homosexuality. By the same token, there are no legal protections available to opposite-sex couples and no laws to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or expression. All of which underlines Gena’s double-edged courage in pursuing her unique one-person activism.
“I was amazed by the bravery of Gena when she called me immediately, saying that she physically cannot stay home,” director Agniia Galdanova explains to Business Doc Europe of Gena’s response to the Russian invasion. “She needed to go on the streets and to do a performance against the war. We decided to not do it on the first day, but we did it a couple of days later as we tried to strategize behind what’s going to happen if we get arrested and so on. But I think here is the perfect combination of art, which must disturb social oppression [because] a lot of people in Russia are blinded by the really well-designed propaganda machine.”
The director was equally creative in her decision to get her DOP to wear roller blades in the event of Gena’s arrest (which we see) in order that he could flee to safety with the footage.
Throughout the film, Gena is given further opportunity to express her artistry within small vignettes, whether as an outlandish insect thrashing in despair on a bleak landscape, or while being subsumed by faceless humanoid creatures wearing the colours of the Russian flag
Galdanova explains how she saw an evolution within Gena during the production of Queendom, both “as an artist and a human being.” As importantly, she also recognised Gena’s transition towards politicisation.
“I remember the moment when she called me and said that she understood the bigger purpose of Instagram as a platform to spread the message. And that’s when this other layer of activism unfolded and that was beautiful, just to see how it’s growing bigger in her personality,” she explains.
“With all the laws that have been created in Russia in the last years, this was very timely because right now it is (terrifying) what’s going on for our LGBT community. In 2013, the first kind of glimpse of this appeared when they passed a law banning the propaganda of non-traditional relationships among minors. And then last year, they extended it to everyone. So basically now any public representation of gay and transgender people is banned in Russia. It means that you’re not allowed to be yourself.”
In essence, this means that Gena’s entire existence in Russia can be considered a crime by the authorities. “Which is why she has become a huge support for the community,” says Galdanova.
The director always imagined that within the narrative arc of her film there may be some kind of reconciliation between Gena and her grand-dad (although she could never have imagined the invasion of Ukraine during the production). To some extent, there is indeed an eventual thawing of enmities as Gena seeks a life elsewhere, well beyond Russian borders.
“They definitely love each other,” Galdanova underlines. “It’s just a very classic generational gap…There will be a lot of [audience] people saying, ‘oh my God, these are the exact words that my mother, that my father, my grandfather is telling me about how I’m supposed to live my life, how I should earn money…’ So somehow we catch the very [universal] subject matter, this kind of mixture of broken family ties – but still full of love.”
Galdanova further recalls the response of an elderly gentleman at a screening in Seoul who recognised himself in the character of Gena’s grandfather, and who subsequently expressed his sense of regret over past impatience borne towards his family.
“We changed the mind of one older guy and now he might not be treating his sons, his daughters in the same way anymore after watching this movie. We obviously did something right,” Galdanova signs off.
