on the origins of Femen

Some thoughts on

Oxana
France/Ukraine/Hungary 2025
Charlène Favier

The Ukrainian protest group Femen denounced the tyranny of Putin and Lukashenko long before it was fashionable, but has been widely ignored and belittled in the UK media. Even now, while everybody loves to hate Putin and love the Ukraine, we don't hear much about them. I have occasionally looked up their activities, if only because as a veteran of WNBRs, I have a cultural interest in naked protest activities, but without that, I wouldn't have heard anything about them in the last ten years.

So I was grateful to stumble over this biopic of Femen founder Oksana Shachko (1987-2018) and found it very enlightening in that it taught me a lot about the history of the organisation that I hadn't known.

In a nutshell, Shachko and two friends founded Femen in their home town of Khmelnytsky (western Ukraine) in 2008 to protest against the marketing of Ukraine as a destination for sex tourism. According to the film, a radio competition in New Zealand was about to send a man to Ukraine for a week's worth of free adventures with a local escort of his choice, and Femen's underwear protest succeeded in getting the trip cancelled. A year later, the activists moved to Kyiv and started using bare breasts as their main means of protest - and the space to write their slogans on.

They attempted protests in Belarus and in Russia as well, which led to violent persecution from the KGB. The three founding members fled to Paris to seek asylum there, and found that one of their members, Inna Shevchenko (who had joined the group in Kyiv in 2009), had set up a Femen training camp there and styled herself as the leader of the global Femen movement without consulting the founders (the film seems to suggest). Shachko returned to her career as an artist, combining the aesthetics of orthodox iconography with "blasphemic" content. The film sets glimpses of the last day of her life against flashbacks to her life in Femen.

All in all a very moving and tragic life story, and very timely too, as the issues haven't gone away. Released in Germany on July 24, 2025 (trailer). I don't have much hope for a UK release (therefore added it to the films not shown list), but would watch it again if it happened, if only because I had to put up with the dubbed dialogue in the German version.

Film poster for the release in Germany, X-Verleih.

PS: there's also a documentary with the real Oxana, called "Je suis Femen" (2014). Stop press, just found it on YouTube. This film gives the impression that as of 2014, the three founders were still ok with Inna Shevchenko's role as supreme leader. Separately, she talks about her art (in faltering French) here - and mentions that she left the Femen movement in 2015. This was filmed less than two weeks before she died.