Hot Docs: Pussy Riot - A Punk Prayer

Amir here, reporting from the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.

Most critics who take notes during screenings will testify that, at least once, they’ve encountered a film that renders their notes useless. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer was one of those films, which is fitting since co-directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin manage to capture the anarchic spirit of Pussy Riot quite authentically. Having started my notes with a relatively balanced number of positive and negative points, I found myself with almost a page full of crossed-out complaints and a film I felt compelled and excited by in equal measure.

Pussy Riot, an HBO produced documentary, follows Nadia, Katia and Masha, the three leading members of the now infamous Pussy Riot movement – a group of feminists who organize spontaneous demonstrations against the totalitarian Putin regime in Russia. [more]

Following their trials, which led to a two-year sentence for all three women, the directors combine footage from the courtroom, Pussy Riot’s audacious musical performances, public street protests to their arrests in Moscow and interviews with their family members to create a riveting narrative that becomes increasingly incisive as the film progresses.

As A Punk Prayer begins, images of a quiet night in Moscow are contrasted with the clandestine meetings of the group members planning for an impromptu performance. Right off the bat, the audience is made aware of a society in which outright dissent is boiling underground even if it doesn’t quite surface in apparent ways. Such jarring juxtapositions are given more contextual depth as different pieces of the puzzle gradually fall into place. After an unexpected performance in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior enrages the Christian Orthodoxy (and consequently the government) and results in Pussy Riot’s arrest, the filmmakers embark on a mission to view the story from as many perspectives as possible.

Though quite sympathetic to Pussy Riot’s activities and supportive of the efforts to release the women, Lerner and Pozdorovkin don’t fail to show the overwhelming opposition to Pussy Riot’s unconventional methods among large factions of the Russian society. In fact, they build their film on the foundation of these differing socio-political ideologies. The international attention received by the case is contrasted with images of the conservative Russian families gathered in a prayer to request the imprisonment of Pussy Riot members. A Madonna concert in Moscow – in which she requested the girls’ release and sported the name of the group on her skin and their headwear on her head – is juxtaposed with Orthodox priests debating about ways in which such blasphemous opposition can be shut down.

In their treatment of the Pussy Riot members, too, the directors act with level-headed judgment where they could fall for a hero worshipping trap. Though the upbringing of the girls is reviewed in short segments, tuned to interviews conducted with their parents, that don’t reveal anything more than a Wikipedia article probably could, the fly on the wall sound recordings of the conversations between Nadia and her friends provide unparalleled insight into their psyche and both their human and political reaction to their condition. It is a testament to the film’s strengths that the audience leaves the theatre not necessarily bemoaning the girls’ jail sentence – though depending on your political beliefs, that may well be – but pondering about the nature of injustice and the revolutionary efforts to overcome it in different shapes. 

Comments

[Nathaniel R]

for a second there the images read Spring Breakers.