Director: Agniia Galdanova

Features: Gena Marvin

Filmed in Russia just prior to the invasion of Ukraine, this illuminating and visually striking documentary profiles Gennadiy aka Gena Marvin, a male-born Russian drag queen and artist provocateur. We meet Gena in her hometown of Magadan where she lives with her grandparents. Tall and thin with shaven head and eyebrows, she cuts an otherworldly figure in huge platform heels and avant-garde costumes made of latex, duct tape and paper mache. In an early scene Gena, accompanied by her grandmother, is asked to leave a supermarket because of her attire. Her grandmother explains that Magadan is a Gulag town close to several Cold War-era prisons so it’s no surprise that intolerant attitudes prevail. Her grandparents are broadly understanding and Gena’s scenes with them provide some of the film’s most affecting scenes. The gruff grandfather can be dismissive and given to spouting homophobic epithets, but it becomes clear that his main concern is how Gena will make her way financially. She moves to Moscow to study makeup on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine. While expressing no political opinions as such, Gena does attend a protest against increasing state authoritarianism dressed, controversially, in the colours of the Russian flag. Her travails are juxtaposed with performance pieces, some which seem to allude to notions of birth/rebirth, as Gena claws her way out of a plastic bag, or writhes around in primordial mud, the performances vividly rendered via crisp photography. There are disturbing scenes in which the seemingly fearless Gena and her friends are abused and assailed by locals, but there is humour too in a telephone conversation with her grandad where he exasperatedly tries to pin down exactly how Gena will transfer Instagram stardom into financial gain; and in a wryly amusing sequence in which Gena is taunted by soldiers on ‘Paratroopers Day’, who, in their just-so blue berets and hooped vest tops, cut pretty camp figures themselves.

David Willoughby

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