The Ukrainian feminist movement FEMEN is already known all over the world as a group of young topless girls who protest against patriarchy and dictatorship. You may like them or hate them but anyway you see a lot of TV-reports, photos, interviews with FEMEN girls and you know who they are. Kitty Green, an Australian film director also has seen them for the first time on TV. She was so impressed that after a while she decided to go to the native country of her grandmother – to Ukraine and make her first feature-length documentary about the mysterious group FEMEN. She spent fourteen months “living with four Femen activists in a crumbling 2-bedroom Soviet apartment on the outskirts of Kiev” and has made a film that discovers who really stands behind the movement. But Kitty wasn’t just looking for sensation in her film, she tries to understand psychology of the girls and what real Feminism is. Fourteen months of being together allowed Kitty to become a close friend of the FEMEN girls, allowed her to see what never has been seen by journalists or by any fans, but at the same time she managed to be objective and to show her characters from both sides. Masterful editing gives this documentary a strong dramaturgical line and unexpected turning points. At the  beginning we see interviews with the girls about the philosophy of the movement and about their fight and the film seems to be propaganda for these bold girls. The dark and grey colors of their life in messy Soviet style flats, metro stations and streets; the bright colors of their protest signs, the ribbons on their head and the words on their breasts during protestations. Songs performed by men from the Red Army Choir emphasize the brutal pressure of male power in their society… But suddenly your attention is turned on: there is conflict with their parents who don’t accept what girls are doing. The mother of one of girls accuses a man named Victor of being the founder of the group and the author of all their protestations. Firstly, the girls deny this. They try to  hide Victor’s role in the movement, but courageous Kitty’s camera continues to film clandestinely as we hear the voice… The voice of a man, who is the real leader of the group, who shouts at the girls and gives them orders. FEMEN women who just some minutes ago were presented as valiant and powerful feminists become weak women who are afraid to say a word to him. Gradually he begins to answer Kitty’s questions.. “Yes, I’m a father of New Feminism… yes, it is paradox maybe.” As it often happens in life, the girls of FEMEN turn out to be an example of what they are fighting with.

I personally met the group FEMEN for the first time in October ‘12 in the Czech Republic. They were very passionate about the violence towards women that is rampant in families, society and religions. I was really touched and offered them as much support as I could.  Today at the press-conference in Venice they said the same things and seemed maybe even more obsessed by the thought that all men just want to use women. Maybe because of the film, maybe something changed inside me, but today this obsession showed up for me as a weakness of these girls. Their own actions in this gender war are in themselves declarations of defeat. But on top of that, this war actually exists only in their own minds and through their topless actions they try to make it real. By trying to fight the trend of women being used as sexual objects, they unknowingly promote this instead... At the press-conference the girls confessed that they hated Victor and they had already broken up with him. They said that now they had restarted the international feminist movement FEMEN without any male or female leader, now they had started a real organization that will make decisions collectively. So this film made by Kitty Green captured a part of history that is developing now, and we are going to see the continuation very soon... 28/30