Alyona, Alik and Katya belong to a generation of young Russian women who demand what they are not allowed. They are part of a global youth that dreams of self-determination and freedom. Sybilla Tuxen followed her protagonists between 2018 and 2022, up to the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the three young women find themselves in a new reality. Now more than ever, they are rebelling against Putin’s state and have since lived life on the go.

One of them has made it to Georgia, another goes to Spain, while the third stays at home. They keep in touch by smartphone and social media. One hears from their conversations that they, like many others, don’t believe that political engagement can change anything. Their resistance rather consists in leading modern and western lives in which gender, sexuality, pop music and identity issues play important roles. Tuxen’s darkly poetic debut film is set in nocturnal cars, flats and backyards. The transit in which the three find themselves becomes physically tangible. Their stories allow us rare glimpses into an almost invisible side of today’s Russia and the complexity of lived contradiction.

The situation lasts only a few seconds, but it is meticulously reconstructed over 15 minutes. In a French city, a police command raids a neighbourhood at night and shoots a young man without checking whether he is armed or has committed a crime. One of dozens of surveillance cameras in the area records the incident. The time between two shots taken by this camera is 67 milliseconds: One image shows the bullet, the next does not. The directing and artist duo fleuryfontaine use this surveillance footage and combine it with images retroactively animated using the Blender graphics software to take an almost forensic look at the positions that each of us takes in today’s artificial and security-fixated environment and that determine our behaviour, our body and our relationship with the world and other people. With its elegant and austere structure, the film insistently questions the excesses of the use of violence and its legitimacy in the police and other public organs.