It’s Gena’s birthday. She’s dancing in a crowd, bathing in the red light of the club. She’s bald, her head painted white with an angelic gradient of silver spilling down her eyes, nose, and mouth. She pumps and twirls her body, the white tulle of her dress flowing from her wrists and neck. She wears a soft smile as she grooves towards the ground, rubbing and loving every part of herself, letting the crowd swallow her. The thumping techno warps, the repetitive beat now traveling through a tunnel to reach us — to reach me, sitting in the cinema, mesmerized.
Another sound fades in, something like a drone or a plane or a siren. The scene cuts to a shot of Gena’s phone the next morning. She’s watching an Instagram story: a flare of light flying through the night sky, a siren blaring in the background. We can hear the voice of the person recording the video, “this doesn’t seem to be fireworks.” The next video — a Russian tank pummeling through the streets of Kyiv. Then, it’s Putin — we only see his face for a moment, because the scene cuts to Gena. She’s in bed watching the horrors unfold through her phone. She has a sober look as Putin’s voice echoes, “I have decided to conduct a special military operation [to defend] those subjected to abuse and genocide by Kyiv over the last eight years.” What a liar, everyone knows it.
Then she’s in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette as the news plays in the background. The announcer reviews a new amendment — up to 15 years in prison for anyone who calls for an end to the war. She exhales smoke. Then, the sound of an egg frying. Gena stands by the stove poking at it with her spatula. She still has to eat, after all.
I imagine it’s when she’s preparing her breakfast that she makes the decision about her next performance. The film cuts to two friends wrapping Gena in barbed wire — it hurts. She wears a skin-tone bra and compression shorts to give the effect that the piece is just wire and bare skin. Well, wire and her platform heels. Even in protest, Gena stays fabulous.
Gena stalks down the sidewalk in the freezing cold. It’s winter in Russia. She crosses a bridge in the downtown area of Moscow until she’s arrested. The director of the film, Agniia Galdanova, unseen until now, runs towards Gena and gets arrested with her. Gena and Agniia are tried for this anti-war performance. It’s what forces them both to flee the country.
QUEENDOM is a documentary that follows Gena Marvin, a trans performance artist from a small town in the far east of Russia. She creates surreal costumes and stages public performances as a means to resist, disrupt, and wake people up. The meaning of her work can at times be ambiguous and humorous, but its effect is irrefutable. Gena is the kind of artist who embodies her work in everything she does; she is the art. And in a place like Russia, her mere existence as a queer person is political.
Magadan, the town where Gena grew up, was originally a forced labor colony built by artists and political dissidents who were arrested during the Stalin era. I wonder about the untold stories of Gena’s ancestors, and whether her immense courage and commitment come in part from their defiant spirit. Many of the people kidnapped and shipped away to Siberia died from the harsh working conditions and extreme cold. The history is violent and has created a legacy of fear and subservience amongst the people there. Putin’s reign has only brought about more aggression, especially towards queer people. But Gena’s existence is proof of a different, untold story. Her existence in public is a miracle and points to the inevitable existence of all those who came before her — even if their stories were buried in the snow.
As mesmerizing as Gena’s work is, Agniia’s directorial vision frames her within what can only be described as a cinema poem. Agniia’s QUEENDOM expands the bounds of what documentary can do, which is particularly beautiful as Gena is someone who expands the bounds of what it means to be human. Agniia places us inside of Gena’s subjectivity in a way that few documentarians do. From the 300+ hours of footage Agniia captured, she expertly weaves together concentric circles of meaning.
In the center is Gena’s relationship with her grandparents. She struggles with her grandfather in particular. He wants her to stop with all the “crazy costumes and inappropriate photoshoots” and instead focus on her education and getting a good job. We can still feel his love for her, but his views on what is possible in life are so narrow that his fear of her “strangeness” overcomes him. He is cruel to her.
One layer out is Gena’s relationship to her school and local community. As part of her personhood and artistry, she chooses to be bald, have no eyebrows, and wear surreal, creature-like costumes out in public. Of course she is aware that her presence in the grocery store draws attention, but she doesn’t mind, it’s sort of funny if you let it be. Why shouldn’t people be able to be whoever they want? Security officers and other self-appointed “gender police” tell her she is “overly provocative” and her presence is going to cause problems for everyone, as if it’s Gena’s fault that there are hateful people who would beat her up if given the chance.
In this layer of the story, the camera often lingers on tableaux of men in public spaces. Following Gena’s gaze, we watch different groups of men stand together — smoking cigarettes, drinking, spitting, cackling. According to one particularly belligerent woman who screams at Gena from her window, “men are decent… respectable, work in jeans,” and don’t “prance around in tights with a wiener that hasn’t grown yet.” And in some distorted sense, she’s right. Work, jeans, and dick size are the dominant indicators of a certain kind of manhood. But how can any person live authentically, in love and without fear, if the scope of what is acceptable is so disturbingly limited? There is an awareness of this that Gena and the camera share, which creates a kind of simmering defiance that runs through the whole film.
The final, outer circle is the relationship between Gena as a politicized body and the state. It is through Gena’s performances that we gain access to the nagging, desperate feeling of someone who is living in a world that hasn’t caught up, woken up, or opened up. Gena’s performances reverberate with layers of meaning that mirror the film’s first formal proposition — its title, QUEENDOM.
A “kingdom” is patriarchy, white supremacy, colonization, imperialism, and the consolidation of power at the expense of the people. Queendom is a new (and ancient) world order. Queendom is circlusion — the same physical action of organizing society, but from the opposite perspective. Because it is not penetrative, prescriptive, or dominating, it can be receptive, intuitive, and maybe even driven by care for people over the pursuit of profit. A Queendom evokes the communities of trans women I know in Brooklyn who lead and organize micro economies and resource sharing for the benefit of all in need. A Queendom evokes a world in which we allow each other to be as we are — imperfect, fleshy, vulnerable, ever-changing, soft animals. Gena calls herself an “entity,” and she lives in defiance of anything that tries to make her, or anyone else, smaller than that.
QUEENDOM is a distress flare shot up from the Siberian tundra, a warning sign of what’s to come. Just after Gena left Russia, a new law was passed which states that the “international LGBTQ+ movement” is an extremist, terrorist organization. Any form of LGBTQ+ rights activism, which includes any expressions of queerness in public or private life, is now illegal and punishable by up to 12 years in prison. Everything Gena does in the film would now be impossible, and it has only been three years since she left.
This new law builds on a series of escalating policies, which began with Putin’s “gay propaganda ban” in 2013. Similar legislation in the US was passed in 2022 with the “drag queen bans” and the “don’t say gay” laws that swept through various states. The conservative right in both Russia and the US gain support for these sorts of policies by claiming they exist to “protect children.” They falsely link the LGBTQ+ community with pedophiles and sex offenders as a way to stoke fear, division, and distraction. We see a similar strategy employed around immigrants.
As Americans, we have always thought of ourselves as “different” from the rest of the world. Other countries, like Russia, suffer from corrupt regimes who enact unthinkable violence, but here in America, we have a “democracy” with “checks and balances.” Therefore maybe it’s OK that our political participation is limited to voting occasionally and reposting news headlines on social media. But as the last month has shown us, Trump and Musk and their cronies will take all the power we don’t actively deny them. And while the US and Russia have very different histories, the parallels between the way Putin has escalated anti-LGBTQ+ policies in Russia and the escalating legislation in the US cannot be ignored.
I am speaking to myself when I say: It is time to live in defiance. And for those of us who can, do so in public. Gena, to me, serves as a beacon of light, a wild flower blooming in the ice, a trans woman who has fought to survive and chosen to thrive even in the most inhospitable of landscapes. QUEENDOM was shortlisted for the Oscars and ultimately not nominated, but this film holds the message that any of us who have the time, interest, or privilege to be reading a film review most need. Not to be dramatic, but the time to become disciplined in our organizing efforts is now. I refuse to let our community get buried in the snow.
All images used courtesy of the film. QUEENDOM is available to stream on Prime Video and Apple TV.
