Faith, Hope, Love

Russian filmmaker Katja Fedulova’s homespun documentary offers a sketch of outspoken women fighting on the frontlines of the never-ending post-Soviet culture wars. Fedulova’s first featured subject here is her own grandmother, a WWII heroine who survived the worst of the war. She is a true adherent of the Soviet cause, someone who "always believed in the goodness of socialism." Fedulova next turns her attention to the grim city of Kursk, where the focus is on two women making waves on the local political scene. Viewers meet Olga, who has fashion-model good looks and a fiery activist bent. Olga has been accused of slander and "extremism" by the powers that be for her role as a journalist for the grassroots quasi-socialist newspaper The People’s Reporter, but now she’s running for local political office, and there is a make or break feel to the proceeding as this may be Olga’s last chance to save her political future. Although Fedulova also follows the story of anti-abortion feminist Natalia, it is really Olga’s Sisyphean struggle against her country’s entrenched oligarchic political machine that delivers the most insight into what life in post-Soviet Russia has become (in a nutshell, honesty simply doesn’t pay). As much as Faith, Hope, Love tries to manufacture a sense of hope for the future of free thinking in Russia, the reality shown is undeniably bleak. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)