Officials ban first Russian screening of Pussy Riot film, A Punk Prayer
The first public screening in Russia of a documentary about the activist group Pussy Riot was cancelled by the government at the last minute, organisers say.
The first public screening in Russia of a documentary about the activist group Pussy Riot was cancelled by the government at the last minute, organisers say.
The film, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer," was to have been screened in Moscow yesterday afternoon, less than a week after two members of Pussy Riot were released from prison.
Their two-year sentence, on charges of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for performing a protest song in a Moscow cathedral, was commuted under an amnesty from the Kremlin on Monday.
But on Saturday, the directors of the Gogol Centre, a state-financed theatre, received a call from the authorities threatening their jobs if they screened the documentary, said Maxim Pozdorovkin, who directed the film with Mike Lerner. A letter from the Department of Culture in Moscow formally banning the screening followed.
I thought once I got past the border it would be safe to [show the film]
The letter, which was posted online by one of the centre's directors, accused the artists and filmmakers involved of being provocateurs, and said their brand of culture had no place in a government building.
The role of art, it said, "is to save the world, make it better, not to inflame the public with scandalous stories that have no cultural merit". "Let's hold tight to those principles," it concluded, "and keep everybody safe."