Patriarchy Protest

Green sent FEMEN the footage and asked if they were interested in making a documentary – “they were so contradictory, so bizarre, yet also really beautiful and easy to make look cinematic – they were a perfect subject” – and soon found her entire life changing. “I spent 14 months living with them; there were six of us in a two-bedroom apartment. We became like a family. I became their videographer. I spent a year with them documenting every protest, and started making this film.”

Ukraine Is Not A Brothel is a non-fiction chronicle of the life and times of the women of FEMEN, an “honest portrayal of what their experiences of being in this movement were actually like.” The result is a film that is part go-go ‘girl power’ feminism, part sobering portrayal of the realities of how society treats young women taking their clothes off. Eventually, Green discovered that FEMEN’s ‘consultant’ Viktor Syvatski functions as its self-appointed svengali, the collective’s founding father finding the blondest, most beautiful girls – as confessed “marketing strategy” – then keeping them on a short leash.

“I started out making a film about a feminist movement, then came to discover, slowly, that [FEMEN] was being run in a way that wasn’t exactly feminist,” Green explains. “This discovery was very disturbing, in some ways. Discovering just how dark these contradictions were, just how strange and corrupt the organisation was, that became my fascination.”

This marked shift raises questions about complicity and compromise, adding layers of complexity and contradiction. For Green, it was a “disheartening” revelation but one which – along with her eventual on-camera conversation with Syvatski – proved rewarding. “It undoubtedly made for a better film. A movement protesting against patriarchy having a patriarch at the helm: it was one of those stories you could only come across by accident... There are secrets in there that they would rather I’d not revealed, but at the same time they understand that this is their past, their story. And it’s a story that, hopefully, other women can learn from.”