Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013) Reviews

• An Important Examination at the Deterioration of Democracy in Putin's Russia

  JustCuriosity2013-03-14

  Pussy Riot seemed to be well-received at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. While many people had seen news reports about the arrest and trial of these three young women who are part of Pussy Riot – described as a feminist punk-rock collective – this documentary provides much more detail on these events. The film is informative as it examines how they were tried essentially a hate crime for performing a highly offensive song at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012. The trial was somewhat similar to a trial for blasphemy. The film was interesting and informative, but not terribly creative as a documentary film. Much of the film was simply edited tapes of the trial coverage and other secondary news coverage. There was some background material on the young women and interviews with their parents to provide some context for the events. I would say that the events themselves were more inherently interesting than the filmmakers' treatment of them. Still, since the film has been picked up by HBO it appears that many more Americans will get a chance to learn about this Moscow Show Trial and the tragic deterioration of Russian democracy under Vladimir Putin that this trial serves to demonstrate. Certainly, these brave young women deserve our sincere praise and respect for their efforts to promote freedom in Russia.

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• Frighteningly Pertinent Account Of Relevance to Russia But To Other Countries as Well

  l_rawjalaurence2013-07-06

  Some North American reviewers have dismissed PUSSY RIOT - A PUNK PRAYER for its lack of objectivity in its presentation of the three Russian girls, who dared to perform punk songs at the altar in Moscow's Orthodox Cathedral. I think that 'subjectivity' is precisely the film's point; the girls were tried and sentenced according to the subjective will of the Russian government. In a truly democratic society, different subjectivities are allowed, but not in Putin's Russia, where the girls are expected to apologize for their 'crimes' before being sentenced. Mike Lerner and Martin Pozdorovkin's film unfolds over the course of six months, taking in the performances of Pussy Riot, the trial and its aftermath. While you might not agree with what the girls actually did, they do have a point; they were simply trying to express their views, not incite religious hatred (as the authorities accused them of doing). In the current context, where individual struggles for freedom are being experienced in other territories, as well as Russia (Egypt, the Turkish Republic), PUSSY RIOT - A PUNK PRAYER offers a salutary lesson: the girls are not alone in trying to assert their democratic rights to free speech. Hopefully this film will be given a wide distribution, to make viewers worldwide aware of its important message.

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• Propaganda

  careers-647-7751512013-12-19

  First of all, this is not a "musical punk group". No one ever heard any song from them, except maybe their ridiculous performance in the Churh. Let's quickly recall all their public so called "performances": 1. Public sex in a botanical museum, which was video taped and uploaded to the internet. If you google it, you still have a good chance of finding it. I believe the team was call "Gruppa Voina" at that time.And if I'm not mistaken, they celebrated Medvedev's presidency in such a way. Tolokonnikova was 9 month pregnant at the time. 2. Other members of the team carried out a frozen chicken in their vaginas out of a grocery store. Kids and other people were present. videotaped and uploaded to the internet. 3. Tolokonnikova and others hang by neck in a grocery store several mannequins representing visual minorities (people of Asian background). Public was present in the store. Again, "the performance" was videotaped and uploaded. 4. And of course, the famous performance in the beautiful Christ the Savior Church. Usually people are required to be quiet and decent in this place. Yet they cursed, jumped, etc. I'm surprised that visitors didn't beat and kick them out. If it hadn't happened in Moscow but in some rural church, that would have been the most probable outcome. If it's art, or "political protest", then I'm from Mars. It's good that finally they were stopped before they did something even more outrageous. And if they haven't learnt the lesson - well, Mr. Putin is not going anywhere any time soon.

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• Get all the details of the Pussy Riot controversy

  prettycleverfilmgal2013-04-19

  It's challenging for North Americans to grasp that there's still danger in speaking your mind in many places in the world. So while we all knew of Russian punk collective Pussy Riot and we all heard about the arrest and prosecution of three of its members after an impromptu performance of "Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!" on the soleas of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, we might have been left a little befuddled about the exact magnitude of the uproar. The documentary Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, from directors Mike Lerner and Maksim Pozdorovkin, goes a very long way in casting light on the situation. The power of "punk" is hackneyed in the West by now, but Pussy Riot and members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich prove that in the more repressive areas of the world it still has the power to provoke. And while the women of Pussy Riot became a cause célèbre in the West, with such supporters as Madonna, Yoko Ono, and Amnesty International, we learn from Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer that the opinion of the Russian public was far more complicated and divided. While there's no doubt where the bias of this doc lies, the directors do an admirable job of documenting the turmoil surrounding three young women who stand on the courage of their convictions. Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer is one to see. If you're not lucky enough to be in Toronto during HotDocs 13 or you can't score a ticket to any of the 3 screenings, HBO has bought the film and announced plans to air it June 2013.

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• West's "Pussy Riot" media coverage worse than "Soviet era" propaganda.

  ladrecrusl2015-06-30

  When the US government sanctioned the beating and arrest of US citizens for swaying from side to side in the Jefferson Memorial a couple of years ago, it provoked no response from the Western media (and therefore the Western zombie-citizens who rely entirely on the media for their 'opinions'). Yet the Russian government, sorry, 'Putin' (because everyone knows Putin is a dictator, right?) is broadly denounced as a 'tyrant' by these same Western zombies (again because their 'outraged opinion' was deftly inserted into their brains by the Western media) for putting a stop to the ugly spectacle of deranged Russian women sticking chickens up their nether regions in supermarkets, daubing outlines of phalli on bridges, staging lewd events in a museum and cavorting around like retards in Russian Orthodox churches as part of their 3 year long international attack on the Russian government. Even the name 'Pussy Riot' strongly suggests that this band of nihilists has always viewed the English-speaking world as their main audience. If informing the Russian people about problems in Russian society was their main goal, surely a Russian name would have been top of their list of requirements. But that's not the job with which these self-described 'Trotskyists' were tasked. Their job is to provoke a reaction from the Russian government which can then be used by Western governments and media to launch an 'anti-Putin' propaganda offensive to prepare the ground for a plausibly 'popular uprising' against the Russian government. As we have seen recently in Ukraine, foreign governments can be 'legitimately' overthrown by a relatively small group of Western government-backed protesters without either the input or support of the vast majority of the population of the host nation. http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/who-or-what-is-russias- pussy-riot.html The Guardian's article titled, "Pussy Riot trial 'worse than Soviet era'," opens immediately with overt propaganda, describing the courtroom and Russian flag as "shabby" and a police dog as "in search of blood." The British paper attempts to portray Russia itself as having a "stark divide" between conservatives and liberals, the latter fighting against the state "with any means it can." Already the Guardian runs into trouble - by portraying Russia as "divided" it is dismissing recent elections that granted Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party a sound mandate to lead the country. And while it is true that in reality, between voter turnout and Putin's garnering the support of 63% of those that did turn out (in a 5-way race), only about 40% of Russia's total registered voters actually voted for Putin, his mandate is still sounder than that of US President Barack Obama's 32% in a mere 2-way race, or last year's victory here in Thailand by Yingluck Shinawatra with a tenuous 35%, a victory hailed by the Western media as a "sweeping" mandate Helping to push down on this political lever are propaganda outfits like the Guardian, portraying the trial as a case of liberal Russian opposition groups fighting against a judicial throwback to the Soviet Union. In reality, it is another Wall Street-London production in the same vein as Serbia's US-funded Otpor movement, the Kony 2012 fraud and the US-engineered "Arab Spring."

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