A beautiful and grim fairy tale about a Russian bird of paradise looking for a place to spread its wings.
Already in the first scene you can hardly believe your eyes. An elderly lady and a tall, slender being, both dressed entirely in white, walk through a snowy landscape. The younger of the two clings to the woman’s arm, its sky-high heels slipping on the snow. Once released into the fairytale winter wonderland, the fragile figure transforms, as if from myth, before the elderly woman’s camera. The cold, the uncomfortable shoes, passers-by; nothing seems to faze it.
This is our introduction to the Russian Gena, who grew up in the country’s merciless countryside. She [her preferred pronoun] is a transgender artist, using herself as both canvas and stage. Gena has flown from the hamlet of their parents and lives in Moscow, where she is trained as a make-up artist, but mainly engages in artistic and political battle together with like-minded people against the openly anti-LBTQI regime of Russia. She experiences homophobia and queer hatred on a daily basis: in a supermarket Gena is walked off the premises because of her outfit, on the street people open their windows to bully her.
Filmmaker Galdanova follows her extreme and highly cameragenic subject during an eventful period in their life. She records how Gena moves around in a narrow-minded community, where she sometimes have to run for her life, has to take punches in the face but also elicits admiring reactions when she moves through the Moscow metro like a walking, crawling work of art in her self-tailored costumes.
When Gena participates in a demonstration against Putin, she is suspended from her education and forced to return to the countryside, to the home of the grandparents who raised her. We witness Gena’s interactions with her grandfather in particular, a man who condemns her outspoken behaviour and extravagance. Why don’t you just act normal, why don’t you stop shaving your head and eyebrows, why don’t you join the army?
The film gives all its characters plenty of room to display their full humanity: the grandmother who tries to keep the good peace between the conservative grandfather and the provocative Gena; the grandfather who basically doesn’t want anything bad to happen to Gena and therefore wants her to act normal; and of course Gena who, being the artist that she is, can’t help but express herself in her own unique way.
The filmmaker also leaves plenty of room for Gena the performer – how she transforms into an almost alien creature, walks the streets, performs during demonstrations, on stage and for Instagram where she has a large following. In the end, it is also art that shows her a way out: she is invited to an Italian festival, which is a ticket to freedom. In the big cities outside the Russian borders, she finally experiences what it is like to be who you are.
In addition to Gena’s exciting development and life journey, we also follow, in the background but with great impact, the beginning of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine – an event that has major consequences in Russia for anyone who deviates from the norms set by Putin. Queendom also indicates how not all Russians support their leader: the images of demonstrations, of course with brutal intervention by the police and army, say it all.
Queendom combines depressing everyday Russian reality with the beautiful and incredibly original aesthetic of Gena. It testifies to the power of art and shows why so many people in power in Russia are rightfully afraid of the country’s artists and creatives.
United States/France, 2023, 98 mins
Director: Agniia Galdanova
Producer: Igor Myakotin
Producer: Agniia Galdanova
DOP: Ruslan Fedotov
Editor: Vlad Fishez
Original Language: Russian
With: Gena Marvin
