It turns out, everything you thought you knew about Femen is wrong. Kitty Green’s insightful look into the Ukrainian protest organization is a documentary as matryoshka doll. Operatic bombast gives way to dignified resignation. Independence is weighed down with cultish reliance. And at the very heart of a feminist organization, you’ll find a patriarch. That is, of course, the big reveal of Ukraine Is Not a Brothel: The breast-bearing troupe of activists is controlled by a man. But by the time the film >>>

Admittedly, I'm not sure what to make of Ukraine is Not a Brothel. The premise certainly is compelling; a group of young, passionate woman streak topless in front of important military and political locations in and around Ukraine to protest the status and treatment of women in their country. The general consensus, by these young women and much of their country, is that women in Ukraine are objects of desire, relegated to prostitution, marriage for hire, or the international sex tourism industry. Since its inception in 2008, FEMEN has garnered a lot of international attention for their topless >>>

Shades of Stalinism

Apart from Russians and Ukrainians, the Crimean population also includes a minority of Muslim Crimean Tatars. They were the majority on the peninsula at the beginning of the 20th century, but were accused of Nazi collaboration by Stalin during World War II and deported. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many returned to Crimea. Fearing new deportation, some, like this family, are fleeing.

Via: dw.de

Feminism has long been a dirty word in Russia. Just ask Svetlana Smetanina, a journalist for the state-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper who, in a 2010 article, voiced an opinion that many Russians seem to share: women who self-identify as feminists are harpies, she wrote, “unfulfilled in their personal lives and bent on revenging themselves on men for their own unhappiness.”Smetanina’s op-ed is representative of the outright disdain in Russia toward feminists—an attitude on full display in recent months, crystallized in the Western mind by images of the punk art collective Pussy Riot >>>

Kitty's Green's 2013 documentary Ukraine Is Not A Brothel has timeliness and titiillation on its side. It's not only that it's about protestors making a statement against the exploitation of women in the former Soviet republic that is now the world's tensest hotpot. It's about Femen, the women known for baring breasts in public to protest prostitution in the sex trafficking center of Eastern Europe who have made headlines in recent weeks with anti-Putin protests around the world.  Green's movie is disappointing in that it doesn't spend all that much time showing or telling us about the situation >>>