Kitty
Green’s film Ukraine is Not a Brothel is a very honest and delightfully
composed documentary of Ukraine’s topless feminism awareness group, Femen. The
film that was originally sparked by an article in a Melbourne newspaper was
born of over 700 hours of footage; recorded whilst Green lived with these girls
in Ukraine.
The movie
follows the stories of the young women who protest in order to change Ukraine’s
reputation of being full of female sex-workers and the perception that all
Ukrainian women are controlled by men; they wish for females to be equal to men
and have the same work opportunities.
It begins
with quite an optimistic view of the girls, who each share tales of their
involvement with the organisation, and how it affects them and their families,
through interviews and footage of their bare-breasted protests. Each of the
them are stunning, slim, model-like girls (apart from one, whose grossly
overweight body is used for her ‘shock factor’ and publicity for the group) and
the documentary sheds light on not only their courage in the faces of the
public and hoards of pushy, old, male paparazzi, but also the hypocrisy within
their own organisation. It ends with a bizarre twist, which unintentionally
revealed itself over the course of the fourteen months of filming, that shows
that even the most vocal feminist groups can be riddled with the very
patriarchy that they protest against.
Without
giving too much away, when watching you become aware of a shady male character
named Victor, who remains hidden for majority of the film, but at the end allows
us a brief insight into his involvement with the organisation. The girls also
receive majority of their funding by ‘donations’ from wealthy businessmen, but
choose to ignore the relevance of this.
Visually,
Ukraine is Not a Brothel showed a very bleak Ukraine and used the
subtraction of red from their footage to achieve this effect. It gives the
impression that it is a cold, grey place with a lot of poverty, and uses these
beautiful girls with colourful headdresses and body paint as bright beacons
of hope. Many of the scenes show close-up shots of the bruises and scars that
the girls receive as a direct consequence of getting dragged away by the
authorities during their protests. These allow us to sympathise for the girls,
who truly believe that baring their breasts is the only way out of their
squalor conditions.
Perhaps
the only serious downfalls of the film are that it is very insular and provides
no update of the girls now. The interviews are only centred around those
directly involved with Femen and it would have been interesting, and perhaps
added a different perspective, if we’d have received an insight into the
opinions of the general public about these girls. We can only assume that these
girls are as influential as they tell us.
Ultimately
the documentary was beautifully presented, with many stunning landscape shots
of Ukrainian landscapes. I was really proud (and felt a little bit patriotic) knowing that a fellow Melbournian had made this gorgeous film. The positives certainly outweigh the few negatives of
this film and is very deserving of a 4/5.
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