Powerful but at times harrowing, Queendom tells the inspirational story of Russian performance artist Gena Marvin, who discusses her experiences here with Jake Hall
It’s late afternoon in Paris, where Russian performance artist Gena Marvin is busy fashioning a dress out of old egg cartons. “I’m gluing them onto a dress as we speak,” she laughs, her signature shaved head covered partially by a blood-red hoodie. “It smells so bad, everyone is angry at me!”
We’re online today to discuss Queendom, the powerful upcoming documentary about Marvin’s life and performance art. The time leading up to this point has been turbulent, to say the least; Marvin resettled in Paris last year after being displaced by Russia’s war with Ukraine, not long after being arrested in her home country for her own anti-war activism. “I have papers now, so I’m legal in Paris,” she smiles. “I have a place to sleep and food on my table, so I’m very grateful – especially to the Queendom team. But it’s my first time living in a big European city, so I’m still adjusting and learning how to behave here.”
These ordeals were partly captured as part of the two-year filming process of Queendom, a brutal but beautiful watch. You’ll see moments of queer joy, like a low-key birthday party where she dances in a living room to thumping techno, surrounded by her closest friends. As well as footage of her friends and family, Marvin’s ethereal performances are stitched throughout. She’s lithe, androgynous and staggeringly tall in her stilt-like platform boots, her body often coated in paint and adorned with couture made from junk and gaffer tape. There’s a sense of post-human, otherworldly beauty to her work, but the perils of growing up trans in a deeply patriarchal and queerphobic society loom heavy throughout.
Other scenes will make your stomach lurch with vicarious fear. In one, Marvin wipes blood from her mouth after being assaulted on the street. In a later scene, she wraps her semi-naked body in barbed wire and walks in platform boots to an anti-war march in Moscow, where she’s arrested and thrown into a police van. “I remember being in a trance,” she recalls. “The barbed wire slashed my leg when I was thrown inside. I just sat there in a kind of fog, watching my blood freeze.”
Capturing these moments was far from easy, to the extent that director Agniia Galdanova spent a total of two years filming and working alongside Marvin. Fittingly, the first shoot took place in Marvin’s home town of Magadan, an isolated port town known for its so-called “road of bones,” built by the tortured prisoners of a gulag. Those deemed to not be working hard enough were shot dead. “It’s such a remote area that there are no trains,” Marvin tells Dazed. “It’s so far away from everything that you really do feel like you’re growing up in a prison.” When Galdanova visited in winter, it was -40C. “It was a struggle on many levels,” she says, “but it was the perfect starting point, going straight to the harsh reality of her hometown.”
Marvin was just 14 years old when she first started posting photos online. “I was posing with my lipstick on, I was definitely a local celebrity in my hometown!” This digital notoriety came with a real-world backlash; it was her social media presence that later got her expelled from college. Still, Marvin kept posting. The looks grew more extreme and more elaborate over time, evolving into the striking, creature-like aesthetic she’s known for today. Imagine a glamazon cryptid thrown into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, excavated and then dressed in Rick Owens. Then, picture that creature jogging comically on a treadmill in nine-inch heels, and you’ll be somewhere close to envisioning one of Marvin's most viral posts to date.
Behind the art and fashion, pain is a common thread in Marvin’s work. “It all comes from growing up in such a conservative society,” she explains. “You can’t really hide yourself, so you suffer. Kids are aggressive in school, your family is worried about you, and then they beat you at home.” Now, Marvin is interested in exploring pain on her own terms. “I want to see what my body is capable of,” she continues. “I want to dedicate it fully to art, no matter how painful it might be.”
This dedication is evident throughout Queendom. Dressed head-to-toe in high, DIY glam, Marvin stalks across frozen landscapes and puts her body through untold pain, but she reiterates that “these performances are not as dangerous as my life.” In fact, some of the film’s tensest scenes feature Marvin simply standing in grocery stores, browsing absent-mindedly before being ejected because her “lingerie is showing.” Yet in even these harshest of realities, the documentary strikes a delicate balance between joy and pain. “It’s easy to show only the bad things,” explains Galdanova, “but that wasn’t the idea; the initial goal of the documentary was to celebrate the beauty of queerness, to show an inspiring story of someone who’s fearless, who can be an example for younger generations and educate older viewers.”
These stories are vital, as censorship remains rife. “I don’t even know how to use Instagram right now,” laments Marvin. “I’ve seen people blocked for posting about Palestine, and when the war broke out in Russia, my TikTok – which had around a million followers – was banned. I realised social media can disappear in a second.”
Social media comes and goes, but the documentary paints a nuanced, honest portrait of Marvin’s work, a snapshot of a game-changing artist speaking out in a country that criminalised her and countless other activists for doing so. Governments have long fought to stifle or erase queer joy, creativity and existence more broadly. Queendom flies in the face of censorship. It gives voice to a culture of resistance. “The Russian state sees a threat in me,” summarises Marvin. “They have to make scapegoats of the LGBTQ+ community, because they look at people like and understand that we’re not afraid to speak our mind. We’re capable of anything.”
Queendom is out on December 1, 2023
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