Pussy Riot members turn out for premiere, express safety concerns

NEW YORK -- Movie premieres can bring some unusual guests to the podium. But even the most eccentric aren’t typically wearing masks because they fear reprisals from Vladimir Putin.

At a the New York kickoff for HBO Documentaries’ “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer” on Wendesday, two members of the musical collective did just that. Puck and Headlight, as they were referred to, came to the stage after the screening wearing the group’s signature colorful ski masks, or balaclavas. It was their first trip to the U.S. since Pussy Riot came to worldwide fame, and they were here, filmmakers said, in deep disguise because of what could await them back home if their identities were revealed.

The pair then described the danger they faced. “We do not feel safe now anywhere,” Puck said. “After the sentencing” she continued, alluding to the prominent trial of several band mates, “our government started reacting to this criminal case by passing new laws There’s a law about wearing balaclavas; there’s a law about insulting feelings of [religious] believers ... [An arrest] could be done much easier.”

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The women spoke just after a Skyped-in interview from Moscow with Yekaterina “Katya” Samutsevich, one of the three principal members of the group and the only one of the three involved in the court case who is currently free. (The other two, the early-twentysomething provocateurs Nadezhda “Nadya” Tolokonnikova and Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, are in the midst of serving a two-year sentence at a Russian penal colony.)

Katya, seen on the giant screen of the premiere’s Landmark Theatre venue, told the audience that, despite all the attention the case brought, she felt more despondent about Russian citizens’ ability to criticize religion and their government in the wake of the 2012 trial that made Pussy Riot and Russian freedom-of-expression a global cause celebre.

“Our only hope is visual culture ... creating iconography that can oppose what happens,” she said, saying that textual speech was too dangerous under Russian law. “Realistically, that’s the only way right now.”

Directed by the British filmmaker Milke Lerner and the Russian American Maxim Pozdorovkin, the movie documents the so-called offense of the three women -- performing a snippet of a punk song on the altar of a Russian Orthodox church -- and the trial that followed. Lerner and Pozdorovkin, who are next making a movie about the Bolshoi Ballet attacks, manage some unusually intimate access, particularly during the trial, when the musicians’ interactions with the court and each other are seen at an uncommonly close distance.

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The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has been making the rounds of festivals around the world. It is currently playing at theaters in Los Angeles and New York before airing on the pay-cable network on June 10.

Before the screening, Pozdorovkin introduced the iconic activist-musician Patti Smith as a Pussy Riot supporter and hero of his own boyhood. Smith then took the stage for several minutes and uttered an impassioned plea.

“If we think this [the arrest of Pussy Riot] can’t happen again, we’re quite wrong. Take young girls with pure heart and throw them in prison for voicing a prayer, a punk prayer. It’s incomprehensible,” she said. “The fact that no one just stepped aside and let them express themselves is, to, me one of the great crimes, not just of the government but of the church. These girls spoke from the heart and because of that they were incarcerated.” She compared their ordeal to what she described as religious persecution in Istanbul and Guantanamo Bay.

Pussy Riot has largely not been performing as these new draconian laws have come into place; instead many of the extended members have been concentrating on the legal effort to free their two bandmates.

Katya, who said her own suspended sentence from the trial made communication with her two bandmates illegal, told the audience that “I don’t have a sense of guilt. I have a deep sense of injustice and I’ve been working to free them.”

But she said that even though he own ordeal was over, it was hard for her to remain optimistic about the state of democracy in Russia, saying, “Many of the worst things we were worried about have come to pass in the past few months.”

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