A documentary about FEMEN “Naked War” in Mexico

A documentary about FEMEN “Naked War” by French director Joseph Paris participated in the International documentary festival in Mexico.

Mónica Corona Quiñones shared her review on “Naked War” with us. Mónica Corona Quiñones  is an audiovisual director and cultural radio host, but most of all an eternal and passionate cinephile. 

«Why doesn’t anybody wants to speak of women’s problems? Nobody wants to remember that half of the planet, —yes, half of the planet! —, is still in a state of servitude. Nobody wants to show attention to that topic, not even women themselves», Sasha Shevchenko expresses, co-founder of Femen, a feminist protest group that has managed to be the most close to media of Europe through the use of their bodies as fight weapons and its speech’s as vehicles.

Flowers adorning their heads and naked or topless torsos painted by simple messages of sexual claim; such is the heart of their protests that last just a few minutes before they are intercepted; they are direct and convincing, as much as their youth. They don’t need anything more because the body expresses itself, crossed by genre, language, and ethnicity. And in that way, the feminine body has been exposed with the intention of generating desire, submitted to the beauty standards and the rigidity that social and religious representation have imposed; nevertheless, at Femen they freely reinterpret their bodies showing them as they are and with a different direction: to oppose to prostitution and pornography, as well as reactivate the feminism beyond academic and institutional areas. They act and the world reacts.

This way, Joseph Paris established contact with the group during spring of 2012 and decided to follow closely their activity for around a year, in a total immersion. The director and activist made a philosophic and artistic analysis about Femen that works as a link to every sequence of the documentary, structuring a reflexive narrative and, without doubts, pretty emotional. Also, it counts with the collaboration of Annie Le Brun —writer, poet— and Benoit Goetz —philosopher—, whom comment the different manifestations of this feminist movement, such as their protest in Paris Chappelle against homophobia in the Catholic Church, or well, their confrontations against Tunisian government in solidarity with Femen’s activist, Amina Tyler.

Naked War is Femen’s spirit; a war that happens in this instant with the supportive intervention of young women that express their fight, courage and sensitivity trough the feminine body that punches like a weapon to the patriarchal system and machismo, whose linings are oppressive to women. Also, this feminist movement questions the parameters in which occidental democracy perceive a nude picture as valid or not, according to its own political, religious and commercial interests. Femen expresses this: «this is a war» in which nobody can unpin itself from the corporeity to interact with the world and, by this way, Femen has achieved to impact it with the power of their explosive images and dramatic confrontations. It’s an open door that adds every time more militants on an international level and in the wait for a revolution of women that claim the preconceived ideas about the feminine body exploited and submitted. And this fight for sexual freedom is worth the risk for them, who have no fear to expose their physic integrity to scream very loud «my body, my rules!»