By M. Gessen / The New York Times
On Thursday afternoon, performance artist Jenna Marvin was getting ready for the Cinema Eye Honors, an annual documentary film event in New York. She is the star of “Queendom,” a film by Russian director Agniia Galdanova that has been shortlisted for an Oscar. It happens to be one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen.
“Queendom” follows Marvin between the ages of 22 and 24. Over the course of the movie, she invents and develops her performance style, struggles to be accepted as a drag performer and a nonbinary person by her family and her society, stages several breathtakingly risky protests and ultimately, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, flees Russia. The movie has a remarkably light touch, especially for a director as young as Galdanova: In many scenes, the viewer feels like a fly on the wall.
Galdanova, who grew up in St. Petersburg, studied with Marina Razbeshkina, a storied — and strict — teacher of documentary filmmaking. In her first film, Galdanova followed all of Razbeshkina’s rules: No music, no talking heads, no zoom. Only life, seen from the point of view of a person in the room. But early in the filming of “Queendom,” Galdanova accidentally broke the rules by turning on music while filming Marvin. Then she kept breaking the rules, so the movie became a seamless, and mesmerizing, blend of vérité cinema and performance art.
Marvin’s performance character is, as Marvin herself puts it, a “creature”; but not an otherworldly being as much as an expression of her own inner world. “At once beautiful and repulsive,” she told me. Just as Marvin feels limited in what she can say, her costumes, made out of electrical tape and duct tape, limit her physical movements, outwardly expressing internal constraint. In costume, she becomes some one thing, one state, one idea.
At one point in “Queendom,” Marvin encases herself in white, blue and red tape — the colors of the Russian flag — and walks on dizzyingly high platforms in a protest against the arrest of opposition politician Alexei Navalny. “People chased her and demanded to know what the costume meant,” Galdanova recalled. “And she just walked silently, and not a single muscle moved on her face.”
“Of course not a single muscle moved,” Marvin said. “I was scared to death.”
Marvin grew up in Magadan, 6,000 miles east of Moscow. She came out to her family at 15 as a gay man. When she moved to St. Petersburg to go to college at 19, she met drag performers and acquired an “older sister” who taught her to perform. She began to think of herself as nonbinary. She tried to tell her grandparents, who raised her. Much of “Queendom” follows that relationship. Her grandmother’s love is unconditional; her grandfather demands masculinity and conventional success. Marvin’s grandmother died in November 2022, six months after Marvin fled the country. Her grandfather sank into the world of President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda TV.
Marvin lives in Paris now. She has found success as an occasional runway model for designer Rick Owens. She has also come to think of herself as a trans woman. “I’ve lost my fear,” she said. “I no longer need to convince my grandfather of anything; I needed that when I was scared myself. I just wish my grandmother had lived to see this. She used to say, ‘I hope things work out well for you.’ None of them could have imagined just how well they’d turn out.’” She dabbed her tears with a makeup sponge.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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