The LGBTQIA2S+ community in Russia is facing an increasingly hostile social climate, is tabooed and criminalised. The AR experience opens a digital safe space for the local drag scene where they can perform without fear of violence. At the same time, this artistic occupation of heteronormatively dominated places is a political intervention.

With childlike ease, entertaining and touching, this colourful animation shows the transition of a woman who was born in the “wrong body”. With her family’s support and understanding, Ivan becomes Lada – a happy, content person. Based on a true individual story, this film is also a parable on the ingenuity of the transgender community who sometimes have to take unusual paths to establish a life worth living in an ignorant environment.

In the spring of 2022, security guards in Moscow are tense. Under the guise of a film competition on the architecture of the city, Yana Osman and Anton Khamchishkin are permitted, if nothing else, to film the battlements of the Kremlin wall. But how to speak of the attack when you have to say “special military operation”? How to create pictures of resistance when filming any protest is forbidden? By pondering swallows and mathematical catastrophe theory, for example.

A girl affected by ostracism angrily creates a little demon that is to follow her forever from now on, comforting her in moments of disappointment, but also keeping her locked in her loneliness. In Budanova’s beautiful animation, mental pain takes the shape of an identity figure that seems impossible to get rid of.