“Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr” and “Queendom”

Review by Nicole V. Gagné

Larsen Associates, the premiere public relations firm for independent feature and documentary films, has brought to the fore two remarkable films that will deeply reward all who see them. Both films are currently shortlisted for nominations by the Academy Awards in the categories of short and feature documentaries.

The short is the impressive Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr, produced and directed by Kimberly Reed for The New Yorker. Her film gives you the front-row seat when Zooey Zephyr, a dynamic trans woman and Democrat who represents Missoula in the Montana House of Representatives, engaged in an epic confrontation with her colleagues in April of 2023. Zephyr’s fiery denunciation of their efforts to suppress the rights of LGBTQ+ Montanans led to her being banned from the House, so she made a public bench outside the House Chambers her “Seat 31,” her official seat then being inaccessible to her. Even after a cluster of conservative women commandeer her bench, leaving her no place to sit, she continued to work for her constituency – and serve as Montana’s conscience – standing in front of the House’s snack bar. Zephyr’s rousing sense of commitment is equaled only by her dignity and humor – and by her love for trans activist Erin Reed, whom she proposes to publicly at Missoula’s 2023 Queer Prom, a heartwarming moment captured in this film. The good news? Despite redistricting in Montana, Zephyr was re-elected to the House in 2024. Everyone who feels that the current political awfulness in America is too huge to be resisted needs to see this morale-boosting film. It will give them the courage and the peace of mind needed to ensure that the struggle against bigotry goes on.

A different but equally essential morale-boost comes in the form of Queendom, the feature documentary produced by Agniia Galdanova and Igor Myakotin and directed by Ms. Galdanova. Their subject is the extraordinary Gena (also spelled Jenna) Marvin, a visionary young performance artist of startling courage and intelligence. We see her on the streets of Russia, whether in her hometown of Magadan on Russia’s eastern coast or in the heart of Moscow, putting her own body on the line over and over again as she challenges the complacency and fear that crush the lives of the people around her.

Although assigned male at birth, Gena left that life behind, adopting female pronouns after shaving off her hair and her eyebrows and devoting herself to her provocative body-morphing costumes – a form of street theater that forces her fellow Russians to confront their own confusions and anger; and with some, their own awe and admiration.

The film’s title is somewhat misleading, as Gena’s brand of performance art – appearing as a golden mummy that spins limp and aimless on an otherwise empty amusement park ride; walking down the street near naked, painted like Russia’s tri-color flag or wrapped in barbed wire or drenched in blood – has nothing to do with the familiar drag-queen aesthetic of “Look at me, look at what I’m doing.” Instead, Gena Marvin wordlessly demands, “Look at yourself, look at what you’re doing.” This reversal of the catwalk sensibility informs even her more whimsical costumed appearances, such as the funny video clip of her at a gymnasium, galloping on a treadmill in platform heels and an oversized black balloon body, like some tragic beachball come to life. Her work shares far more with the mind-bending shock costumes of Leigh Bowery than it does with the celebrity-glam imagery of traditional drag performance.

Both Gena and director Galdanova were arrested and pulled off the streets of Moscow as part of the tsunami of state repression launched with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. However, they were fortunate enough to be able to relocate to France and escape the brutalization of dissenters in Russia – some of which we witness in Galdanova’s shocking footage of anti-war protesters being beaten and arrested.

As a document of our times – and a vision of what these times could be, despite ignorance, fear, and hatred – Queendom is essential viewing, an inspiring testament to indomitable courage and imagination.

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Laura Albert

Laura Albert has won international acclaim for her fiction. Writing as JT LeRoy, she is the author of the best-selling novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and the novella Harold's End. Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, have also been released as audiobooks by Blackstone Publishing. Laura Albert is the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig's feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson's film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. She has written for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Man About Town, Vogue, Film Comment, Interview, L'Équipe Sport&Style, Filmmaker, I-D, and others – more recently, the cover article for Man About Town and her reflections on fashion for VESTOJ. A writer for the HBO series "Deadwood," she also wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant's Elephant and was the film's Associate Producer. She has written the short films Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and Warfare of Pageantry for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. For Tiempo de Literatura 2020's “The Narrative Universe of Laura Albert,” she engaged in a wide-ranging ZOOM conversation with Fernanda Melchor, International Booker Prize Shortlist author for her acclaimed novel Hurricane Season. Twitter: @lauraalbert Instagram: @laura_albert