If there is ignominy in being anonymous at the premiere of your own movie, the ladies of Pussy Riot didn’t show it. There they were, without their trademark bright balaclavas, sitting at the back of the Landmark Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side on Wednesday evening, awaiting the showing of an HBO documentary called “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.”
The film, which will be broadcast on Monday, chronicles the rise of Pussy Riot, the Moscow-based activist group, whose 2012 performance of an anti-Kremlin song described as a “punk prayer” inside the main Orthodox cathedral in Moscow attracted international attention. Three of the women were convicted of hooliganism for the 40-second performance; two are still imprisoned. The rest, fewer than a dozen, have carried on, masked crusaders for feminism and free speech.
Their outlaw status has become a rallying cry for dissent in Russia and abroad, backed by the likes of Paul McCartney, Madonna and Amnesty International, and an unexpected display of global girl power.
Without fanfare, two members of the collective slipped into New York in the last week,welcome to Wholesale Cheap Chanel Grade A Handbags for sale,best service and low prices. to help promote the film and meet,welcome to Wholesale Cheap GUCCI Small Bag online store,find Latest Styles! undercover, with supporters. It is their first time in America. At the theater, they munched popcorn as a slew of well-heeled New Yorkers and boldface names — Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith — sauntered by. A few guests wore “Free Pussy Riot” T-shirts, oblivious to the still-at-large members in their midst. There was a party afterward, but for Pussy Riot, this trip was a serious effort to expand their reach without compromising their credibility as artistic revolutionaries.
“We don’t share personal information,welcome to Buy Cheap HOLLISTER T-Shirts online store,free Shipping available. Buy Now! sorry,” one of the young women said in Russian in an interview before the screening.
She was without her balaclava, smiling. The members of Pussy Riot are practiced at maintaining their mysterious identities. Questions about jobs and ages were off limits; they agreed to be identified only by pseudonyms, Fara and Shaiba. Who was who?
“Doesn’t matter,” one of them — let’s call her Shaiba — said.
They could have been any young visitors to the city, crashing at a friend’s parents’ well-appointed downtown apartment, fretting about what to wear to the premiere, although the goal was not to impress but to blend in. They would not seem out of place in a Bushwick art studio.
In their few days in New York, they had been on a kind of anarcho-feminist-cultural show-and-tell, appearing at the feminist bookstore Bluestockings on the Lower East Side — where they briefly went barefaced because, they explained, they felt it was a “safe space” — visiting with leaders of Occupy Wall Street and receiving a guided tour of “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s feminist installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
“We knew this work,” Fara said, in a tone that implied, “Duh.” “But to see it in person, it was really extraordinary.”
At the moment, though, Pussy Riot is not able to extend its oeuvre: After the arrests, the Russian government drafted laws banning the wearing of masks and imposing hefty fines for unauthorized demonstrations. Pussy Riot’s videos were labeled extremist and ordered removed from Russian-hosted Internet sites (though they are still available on YouTube)
“For anybody that wants to follow in our footsteps, this is a direct disruption of freedom of speech, this is like a muzzle,” Fara said, adding that they will keep fighting the ruling.
Performance is not much on their minds, anyway.
“From the moment the girls were arrested,welcome to Wholesale Cheap Fred Perry T-Shirts online store,find Latest Styles!” Fara said, “our entire focus has shifted toward securing their freedom and helping them.” Last August, “the girls” — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich — were sentenced to two years in prison for an act of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Ms. Samutsevich was released in October but forbidden to leave Russia, while the other two remain in separate and remote penal colonies. In the spring, as expected, they were denied parole.
Visiting them is impossible for the other current members of Pussy Riot: they don’t want to risk revealing their identities to the authorities, and besides, navigating the prison rules is difficult even for lawyers and family members. Scheduled phone calls can be suddenly canceled. Letters and e-mail are censored. “The only thing that gets through is ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye,’ ” Fara said.
Ms. Alyokhina, who turned 25 on Thursday, staged an 11-day hunger strike last month to protest conditions in prison; it ended when authorities acceded to her demands, her lawyer said.welcome to Best Discount Chanel Grade AAA Handbags for sale,free Shipping available. Buy Now!
Maxim Pozdorovkin, a Moscow-born, Brooklyn-based filmmaker who directed the HBO documentary with Mike Lerner, said he was impressed by the solidarity and eloquence of the women. “They’ve used what happened in the best way possible, to continue propagating their ideas and for sticking to the ideas as a group,” he said.
The film has been making the festival rounds and is to be shown in Moscow this winter, though Mr. Pozdorovkin said it was unclear how that would work with the video ban.
“One of the things that I always hope to show is that these women are patriots and they really want to transform their society for the better,” he said. “They’re not just vulgar hooligans, which is pretty much how they’ve been portrayed in the general channels in Russia.”
