Artdocfest

ARTDOCFEST: Uncensored Russian documentary festival

This past weekend I took breaks from my "intense studying" aka simultaneously binge watching Law and Order episodes while learning vocab to go and watch two of the many documentaries being shown as part of Russia's largest annual documentary festival "Artdocfest".

This year for the first time in Artdocfest's seven year history, the festival was also held in St Petersburg as well as its native Moscow. This was also the first year that the festival didn't receive any state funding because of the director Vitaly Mansky's public opposition to the Kremlin's anti-Ukrainian media campaign and its activities in the country. The culture minister labelled Mansky's behaviour "anti-Russian" and "anti-state".

So naturally, after such an intriguing introduction to the festival I was desperate to go and see for myself. On Saturday I watched Kirill Sakharnov's film Olya's Love. The film follows the trajectory of an activist's lesbian relationship as discriminatory laws against the LGBT community are passed by the Russian government. From the extremely moving trailer I was expecting to watch something extremely hard-hitting and difficult to watch but what I actually watched was a beautiful and touching love story, an uplifting tribute to those who boldly stand up for who they are even in the most difficult of situations.

The audience's reaction to the film was also fascinating. During scenes that contained any kind of violence, there was expectedly a very tense silence but during scenes featuring rants by homophobic campaigners the audience members around me burst out laughing at their ridiculous and ludicrous behaviour. The people who had sought out this documentary were obviously so accustomed to this kind of outrageous and blatant hatred that it has become somewhat of a joke.

The next day I went to see Swiss director Alain Margot's film Je suis Femen. The film follows artist and activist Oksana Shachko, one of the founding members of the Ukrainian feminist movement Femen, as she and her fellow activists put their personal safety at risk in order to stage topless protests in Ukraine, France, Belarus and Russia.

Sextremism at its best

For the few of you who haven't heard me mention it, last year I discovered the Free The Nipple movement in the United States and became obsessed. In my opinion, Femen contains the same visually shocking and challenging element of Free The Nipple but amplified to a much larger and more political scale.

One of the most interesting quotes of the film was from another of the founders who takes a much more administrative role in the group's activities. She explained that it is important that Femen has a sexy and feminine face since that is not how people expect radical feminists to look. Their aim is to challenge every restrictive construct the patriarchy has imposed on them.

Oksana herself reinforced this point when she took questions from the audience via Skype after the film. I'm sure you can imagine for yourselves how insanely excited and fan-girly I became.

When I look back on my first semester in St Petersburg, that question and answer session is one of my most exciting highlights, if not the most. I was sat listening to a Ukrainian woman discuss issues very close to my heart from her new home in Paris following her exile from her home country for her activism. And all in Russian.

At this point I inexplicably felt that I had made it to the big time linguistically and personally. I very much look forward to more of that feeling come next semester.

Itsy bitsy prima ballerinas

Through some bizarre twist of fate, I was recently fortunate enough to spend a day at one of Russia's most prestigious ballet schools, the Vaganova academy. When our teacher told us that we had been invited to help the children practise their English I was hysterically excited at the thought of meeting Russia's future ballet stars and seeing the studios where many world famous names received their training.

My feelings on leaving the academy, however, were not at all what I had expected. Instead of starstruck I felt melancholy and very sorry for the talented young dancers I had met over the course of the day. Prior to visiting the school, I was obviously aware of how physically demanding life must be for these children but after interacting with the kids and finding out about their everyday lives I was surprised by how deeply moving the experience was.

Many of these children travel thousands of miles aged 11 to come to the academy, they very rarely get to see their family and have absolutely no life outside of the school. I doubt the boarders even spend much time outside.

Whilst watching a rehearsal of a group of 13 year old girls I was shocked by the skeletal figure of one of the girls but later realised that she was just the only one who looked unhealthy. The other girls all looked like perfectly healthy 10 or 11 year olds.

From New York based photographer Rachel Papo's beautiful series Desperately Perfect, which perfectly captures the pupils of the Vaganova Academy

At the end of the third year in the school the children are whittled down to the very best, meaning that around half of the children are asked to leave. The ideal solution for the unsuccessful ones would be to enter into another, less distinguished academy because they are most definitely not educated to a standard sufficient enough to enable them to enter their age group in mainstream education.

A friend asked our guide what happens in case of injury and we were informed that the school allows the children a year to recover. There was no mention of what happens if they do not recover or what their options would be after leaving.

At the end of the day I was left feeling strangely glad that I was not born with no real physical skills to speak of and wondering whether there will ever come a day when society turns away from this undeniably beautiful art form because of the incredible strain it puts on its artists.

All of this was of course mulled over as my friends and I stuffed our faces full of chocolate.

Russian Reminiscin'

Last night after dinner my Russian mum and I somehow ended up discussing the many social and political changes that have taken place in Great Mother Russia over the past few decades and what she had to say was interestingly a lot more relevant to British politics than expected.

This is a woman who had spent all of her life growing up in a society where everyone was forced to have a job and it was simultaneously nigh on impossible to become extremely wealthy. In her eyes, socialism meant that there were as few rich people as there were poor and the majority formed a just about comfortable middle class.

She explained to me that after perestroika, opportunistic oligarchs stole the country's national resources and these Super Rich go on to use their profits to holiday in places like my fatherland (the Seychelles). She also took issue with the fact that they justify themselves by saying that they earned the money; they didn't put in any hours in at the mine or down at the farm. All of their employees, ordinary people, did all of the work that pays for their houses in London and their luxury holidays.

Meanwhile, people have cottoned on to the financial benefits that come along with governmental roles meaning that politicians are no longer motivated by their work for the people, but simply by the money that brings.

It seems to me that although Russia and the UK have had and continue to have vastly different political situations, the gripes of ordinary people here are not all that far from the many dissatisfactions and frustrations we feel at home.

Russian Roadtrippin'

Hours before sunrise on Sunday morning, my Russian mum and I got on the metro along with drunkards on their way home from da club to begin our four and a half hour journey to the dacha. The dictionary definition of a dacha is "a Russian country-house or villa" but I believe this definition somewhat glamourises the average dacha. I would describe it as a cross between glamping and a trip to the allotments.

The highlight of the trip was by far my fast ever trip to a Russian bathhouse. Sergei and Lyuda (my hosts) have their own bathhouse across the road from the dacha. Prior to the experience I was aware of two things about the banya experience: the complete nudity, and the practice of "massaging" yourself with bunches of dried birch leaves. What I did not know was that it is also traditional to wear a hat, ideally one made of felt. A visit to Google has informed me that this is to maintain a constant temperature throughout your body, so that you aren't rapidly overwhelmed by the 93 degree heat. Lyuda did explain this when she handed me a hat but I was too busy trying to work out where to put my eyes to be able to understand much Russian at the beginning of the experience.

Da dacha!

So there I was butt naked, with a red woolly hat on, in the middle of nowhere in a Russian forest. After a brief adjustment period, I took some time to meditate and then taught Lyuda some meditation techniques before getting dressed and heading back to the house to watch hours of crappy Russian TV.

Never a dull day in Russia!

Russian Religion

I originally had the idea for this post a week ago but then my family came to visit a day earlier than I thought they were, thus throwing my life into a wonderfully hilarious and delicious disarray for five days.

I was inspired to write something about religion after our last Cultural Wednesday activity which was, in quite a different tack to previous arty endeavours, a visit to the only large tourist attraction here that is still a functioning church: Kazan Cathedral. I was immediately struck with the soberness of the place as I haphazardly covered my hair with a scarf before going in, something I have never before had to do. This feeling was reinforced by the impressively long queue, made up of young and old people alike, leading up to an icon on the altar.

For those of you who are unaware, the largest religion in Russia is Orthodox Christianity, a religion to which 75% of the population belong and one that was illegal, along with all others, for the majority of the 20th century. In 1932 Kazan Cathedral was transformed into the pro-Marxist "Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism".

Anyone who knows me knows that I am an atheist and occasionally an extremely vocal one at that. Usually my problem with religion stems from the fact that I see it as something exclusive and divisive, a tool used by many to excuse discrimination. I often think that religion should be separated as much as possible from mainstream society and kept as something extremely private. However, the sombreness of my visit to this cathedral made me truly think about the weight of my words in a way I unfortunately don't a lot of the time.

Having grown up in multicultural London, if you told me your were Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim or Jewish I would think "Wow how interesting, I would love to find out more about that", but if you told me your were Christian my reaction would be "they must be a bit of a weirdo". Yet if I heard someone speak the way I often have about Christianity I would instinctively want to accuse them of racism.

I claim to be opposed to religion because it breeds narrow-mindedness but all that attitude does is in turn make me closed-minded to vast groups of people and prevents me from truly seeking to understand them.

Ultimately I want to live in a world where people are free to believe what they choose and a world without religion is not somewhere where this would be possible.

 Here endeth my rant.

That Law and How It Affects Modern Art

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get a free guided tour of the tenth European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Manifesta, from an English girl who is a former student of my school here in St Petersburg.

Being somewhat embarrassingly ignorant of the modern art world, having a friendly guide to follow around made all the difference and I was able to appreciate various pieces a lot more than I ever would have without her insightful commentary. However, what left the most lasting impression on me was not the art itself but the 16+ age rating for certain rooms.

Early on in the tour we saw the work of the transvestite artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe who was most famous for his impersonations of his namesake, Marilyn Monroe. In one room a video was playing of Monroe dancing around in lingerie and frolicking in a bathtub.

Despite the highly sexual content of his work and the fact that this artist is a social media icon for gay rights in Russia, the entrance to the rooms of his work was surprisingly free from the ominous 16+ warning.

Because of the controversial LGBT propaganda law passed last year in Russian parliament, any art considered to be a "Denial of Traditional Family Values" can be subject to the 16+ rating. And there we were, looking at walls covered in pictures of this fascinating man dressed up as Marilyn Monroe in various scenarios including a sequence of photos with a male lover character. To us this seemed a blatant denial of the said traditional values the new law was put in place to uphold yet there was no age warning to be seen.

Later we passed through two 16+ rooms of pieces that that were far less outrageous than Monroe's and weren't sexual in the slightest. The first dealt with the question of gender as a social construct and the second contained portraits of a nude man. Our guide suggested that the latter might carry the rating because they are the work of a female artist in which a male subject is made to seem very vulnerable, thus challenging the traditional value of the macho man. 

I was initially baffled as to why this collage of seemingly innocuous photos was 16+ and those of the male, Russian Monroe was not but then I got to thinking that it was probably not as arbitrary as it seemed. It is easy for homophobes to make a mockery of a larger than life transvestite because they can label him as a freak of nature that exists outside the realm of "Family Values" whereas a thought-provoking piece of art that hints at the theory that gender is a social construct is far less easy to ridicule and explain away.

Once again I am left thinking about how life in this country is infinitely more complicated than it seems in Western media and as always, I look forward to finding out more.

We Need To Talk About Cheese

I have officially lived in Russia for one whole month now! Who'd a thunk it. What's more, I am absolutely loving life here. My living situation is perfect, my friends are great, this city is incredible and my Russian is slowly but surely improving.

But there is just this one tiny thing: the cheese. All of my close friends in St Andrews know that some of my favourite evenings there have been spent eating cheese. They will thus know how difficult I will be finding life here without said lactose nectar of the gods. Obviously there is some cheese but only the plastic kind that I'm sure would have to be advertised as "cheese product" in certain places for legal reasons.

Luckily my classmates also share my pain and thus we have spent many lessons discussing the issue. This may lead you to think that my teachers are terrible at directing our attention but this is not the case. The cheese shortage is in fact a very topical issue as it is linked to the word on everyone's lips: sanctions.

Rumour has it Russian people are crossing the border into Finland to go buy quality cheese and fish. According to another teacher supermarkets are looking far more dismal than they did a few months ago and the quality of the fruit and veg has significantly decreased.

Winter is coming my friends...

No shortage of great pickles though, even in modern art galleries