An artfully striking documentary feature we can’t stop recommending to our friends, families, or anyone asking us the question: “what good movies did you see lately ?” Our answer often includes QUEENDOM directed by filmmaker Agniia Galdanova, who sensitively archived the fall and rise of the Leigh Boweryesque performer and activist, Gena Marvin, as she defied the crusade against freedom of expression in Russia. 

The film is finally out in theatres for the world to learn from this awe-inspiring lesson of artistic courage, carried by warriors of light that my partner Kaitsauka & I had the privilege of meeting in person on QUEENDOM’s premiering night in Paris hosted at the 15th edition of A SHADED VIEW ON FASHION FILM festival, founded and directed by the Stygianly enshrouded fairy god mother of the avant-guard, Mrs. Diane Pernet.  

Our introduction to QUEENDOM‘s protagonist was actually a photo bomb. As our friend the photographer Anna Rakhvalova was about to capture a shot of us and Diane, Gena Marvin bursted into the frame from my left like a glowing full moon wrapped in fur for clouds… an astral body, guarded by two glamorously-alien satellites soon also making their entrance in orbit: Hannah Rose Dalton & Steven Raj Bhaskaran forming the irreverently poetic duo of creators, FECAL MATTER. 

The stars had aligned for a night in celebration of unconventional beauty counting amongst the fondest memories of our festival experience at ASVOFF15, where we surprisingly have been feeling at home sheltered by the reassuring atmosphere radiating from a community of people who were not afraid of authentically being themselves. To feel at home… safe and free to be. A state of being that a growing number of targeted communities around the world are sadly prevented from experiencing by the imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist & hetero-patriarchal regimes, exerting their power to oppress individuals who dare deviate from their dogmatic agenda of conformity. 

Unfortunately, this state of fact is not exclusively contained to Russia where Agniia Galdanova and her muse Gena Marvin have been detained in jail for performatively taking part into pacific protests against the repressive politics of Putin’s administration. Their reoccurring disturbance of the status quo, with Agniia filming Gena simply going about life creatively made-up and dressed in extravagantly beautiful looks, led these artists to having to flee from their home country after having been listed “personae non gratae” by a government on the witch-hunt for who they judge to be an offensive disturbance to public order. 

In fact, a memorable scene in the movie accurately translates this intolerably repressive climate in which Gena is being denied access to a public park in Moscow for being made up and dressed in a candid white costume piece. Thus, a colour often associated with symbols of peace and neutrality starts brooding the dark atmosphere against which a soldier calls out the performer to advise her to leave if she does not want to be evacuated by force. Upon this, Gena rightfully challenges the representative of the order by asking him why this authoritarian intimidation must arise in the public space. The man argues in turn that Gena’s appearance is offensive and inappropriate in a space where families walk by with children on a day of military parade… “How is my appearance offensive ?” replicates, Gena.

At that point, the question is raised for an entire audience to hopefully grapple with their own sense of discomfort around appearances to better challenge it… I must risk myself to try and explain to myself what the argument raised by this soldier really is about: maybe the size difference between the high heels of shoes making the performer taller than the soldier wearing flat boots ? Maybe a variety of shapes between the sculptural volume of the tiara crowning the performer’s head towering over the plain silhouette of the soldier’s kepi ? Maybe the unmatched skin shades between the performer’s snow-white complexion and the soldier’s masked features ?

What this scene actually puts in confrontation is the archetypal representatives of two opposite poles on a spectrum expanding from the conservatively plain to the eccentrically flamboyant, demonstrating in context that the latter is endowed with a capacity for respecting its complementary opposite while the former shows nothing but intolerance for anything that does not reflect its own image. Intolerance is too weak of a word. Hate better describes the actual fuel on which oppressive regimes run their politics by perversely organising the removal of diversity from the public space so that children composing the societies of tomorrow will not be exposed to it, all the better to train them into cultivating a hate for individuality in themselves and others.

QUEENDOM is an essential watch that rings an alarm bell in the 21st century, as we have recently seen too many regressive laws adopted in many other parliaments of the world, for example in America, Iran, Uganda, or more recently in Cameroon, where individuals’ human rights are being diminished or worse removed, under threats of sentences that can go to the extent of death penalties, arbitrarily pronounced upon discriminatory criteria based on an individual’s belonging or identifying with a given group which refuses to bow down to the enforced norm.

Even more disturbingly, Galdanova’s film is a real punch in the way it has contributed to archiving the socio-political degradations of a nation as the world watched it being brought to war against Ukraine by its despotic leader, undemocratically re-elected into power for a 5th mandate of six years under the cover-up of a staged vote which took place over three days from 15 to 17 March 2024.

This cruelly reveals how the studied implementation of hate amongst an entire nation to league up against a targeted group upon command of an all-too-powerful tyrant is what History has reoccuringly taught to be at the root of one too many human massacres, with little to no lesson learned by world leaders on how to offer means to international organisations supporting world peace to effectively take real actions in preventing disasters before they can even escalate. But unfortunately, hate sprouts underground, away from the light, to then perniciously tentacle above surface into demultiplied hydras springing from bad ideological seeds that were not planted yesterday. 

10 years ago already, an article of the Guardian cited: « Alistair Stewart, assistant director of the Kaleidoscope Trust, a UK-based organisation that supports international LGBT rights “To a certain extent that’s happening on a global scale now – the advances that are being made in some parts of the world encourage a backlash in other parts of the world. The struggle for even basic human rights for LGBT people – freedom of association, freedom from violence – becomes harder to achieve when the opponents can point to something like gay marriage, which isn’t even on the books for most of the countries we’re talking about and make the argument that ‘if we give these people even the most basic of human rights, next they’ll be asking to get married in our churches’.” »

In the end, the poignancy of QUEENDOM does not really lie in its undoubtedly stylish visual language, subliming Gena’s performing regalia often adopting the very instruments of isolation and silencing, namely tape and barbed-wire, for materials. Its strength neither lies in the tenderness with which Galdanova pudically lets us peek into the bittersweet intimacy of Gena’s familial circle, relying on two loving grandparents who often struggled to understand the performer’s dedication to her art all the while showing her their unconditional support even in the harshest turns of Gena’s destiny..

After the lights finally came back up into the projection room on that premiering night, Galdanova humbly answered questions explaining that she initially had set forth to capture a choral portrait of the struggle of queer activists fighting against Putin’s regime, before she met Gena and decided to focus a narrative solely on her. And like her I feel it was enough, for Gena is an essence, a symbol that encapsulates you, that encapsulates me. Gena’s and Agniia’s fight is not theirs, it is ours. A fight for our right to peacefully coexist in what the Earth and the manifestation of Sentient Life on its surface has to offer of diversity, which dangerously seems to be compromised by the creeping plague of resurgent extremisms. Although, we can rest assured that there are places where people support each other for beauty to triumph over destruction, standing fast in the face of adversity, inspiring hope and courage, no matter what.