Accessed 4th September 2013
The man who made Femen: New film outs Victor Svyatski as the mastermind behind the protest group and its breast-baring stunts
TUESDAY 03
SEPTEMBER 2013
It’s the
Ukranian feminist group that embarrassed President Putin. Its activists have
staged many protests against sexual and political repression by stripping to
their waists in carefully choreographed media stunts.
“Our mission
is protest, our weapons are bare breasts,” runs their slogan. Now, a new
documentary screening at the Venice Film Festival has revealed that Femen was
founded and is controlled by a man.
Ukraine is not
a Brothel, directed by 28-year-old Australian film-maker Kitty Green, has
“outed” Victor Svyatski as the mastermind behind the group. Mr Syvatski is
known as a “consultant” to the movement. According to the Femen website, he was
badly beaten up by the secret services in Ukraine
However, Ms
Green reveals that Svyatski is not simply a supporter of Femen but its founder
and éminence grise. “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He
hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers.
The prettiest girls get on the front page... that became their image, that
became the way they sold the brand,” she says.
Today, several
of the original members of Femen – among them its best known campaigner Inna
Shevchenko – are due in Venice
Until now, the
full extent of Mr Svyatski’s influence over Femen has not been realised. The
film claims it was he who sent Femen activists on one of their most terrifying
missions to Belarus where (according to testimony in the film) they were
arrested by secret service agents, stripped, humiliated and abandoned in a
forest close to the Ukranian border.
Ms Green
accompanied them on this trip. She told The Independent that her footage was stolen by the KGB
and that she was abducted, “kept in confinement for about eight hours,” and
then deported to Lithuania
In the
documentary, Ms Green pays tribute to Mr Svyatski’s organisational abilities
and charisma but questions his influence over the group.
“He can be
really horrible but he is fiercely intelligent,” she said of Mr Svyatski, who
is interviewed on camera in her film. Ms Green spent a year living in a tiny
apartment in Kiev
Only gradually
did she become aware that Mr Svyatski was pulling the strings behind the
scenes. “Once I was in the inner circle, you can’t not know him. He is Femen.”
Initially,
Mr Svyatski refused to allow Ms Green to film him but she was determined that
he should feature. “It was a big moral thing for me because I realised how this
organisation was run. He was quite horrible with the girls. He would scream at
them and call them bitches.”
When the Femen
founder finally spoke to Ms Green, he sought to justify his role within the
organisation and acknowledged the paradox of being a “patriarch” running
a feminist protest group. “These girls are weak,” he says in the film.
“They don’t
have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong.
Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many
other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are
qualities which it was essential to teach them.”
Mr Svyatski
insists to Ms Green that his influence on the group is positive. However, when
he is asked directly whether he started Femen “to get girls”, he replies:
“Perhaps yes, somewhere in my deep subconscious.”
One of the
Femen campaigners talks of the relationship between the women and the
movement’s founder as being akin to “Stockholm syndrome”, in which hostages
feel sympathy for their captors.
“We are
psychologically dependent on him and even if we know and understand that we
could do this by ourselves without his help, it’s psychological dependence,”
she says.
