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In this absorbing foray into the lives of Soviet women, director Dolya Gavanski speaks to a rich mix of women whose stories give an insider’s perspective on Russian feminism.
As an actress in London, director Dolya Gavanski has played a dizzying array of Russian stereotypes from spies to prostitutes and oligarchs’ wives. But the women she remembered from her Soviet days were different. Gavanski sets out to hear the stories of the women who shaped the narrative of 20th century USSR, including the Nobel Prize for Literature winning author Svetlana Alexievich, internet sensation Elena Krygina and exiled feminist dissident Natalya Malakhovskaya.
With a treasure trove of rare archive, we travel from the censoring of sexuality in Russian ballet, to getting engaged as a woman soldier in World War Two, to the terrible conditions of the siege of Leningrad. The Daughters of the Russian Revolution were raised in a culture that had officially proclaimed women equal to men. They were told they could achieve it all, but at what cost – and what was the reality?
This film is showing as part of our Women’s History Month season.