Pussy Riot Slays Audience at Greenwich International Film Festival
June 9, 2015 · from the Word & Film archive
The inaugural Greenwich International Film Festival produced the year's most improbable red-carpet sentence: Pussy Riot, honored in Greenwich, Connecticut. Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina — veterans of a Moscow cathedral performance, a show trial and Russian penal colonies — accepted the festival's tribute for courage in the arts and held a hedge-fund town spellbound.
The pairing is less absurd than it looks. The women became global figures through a documentary — the HBO film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, which premiered at Sundance while they sat in prison — making them a case study in what the festival was founded to celebrate: film as pressure applied to power.
On stage they were funny, unsentimental and specific — prison anecdotes delivered like tour stories, plus updates on Zona Prava, the prisoners' rights organization they founded after release. Asked about fear, Alyokhina shrugged that fear is a habit, 'and habits can be quit.'
The appearance previewed the memoir-and-lecture era both women have since entered; the punk prayer keeps finding new congregations, one unlikely venue at a time.
