After “slalom” in 2020 and “the daughter called” in 2023, French director Charlene Favier returns with “Oxana”. The film released on April 30 paints an intimate, political, tragic and artistic portrait of the young Ukrainian Oksana Chatchko, founder in 2008 of the Femen Movement.
Carried by Ukrainian actresses, half shot in Paris and Hungary, “Oxana” focuses on the destiny and powerful and fragile personality of Oksana Chatchko. Daughter of Ukrainian workers, this extremely gifted painter creates in the age of 8, incredible icons commanded by the Orthodox church from the age of 8, before diverting this religious imagery to invent an aesthetic grammar from activism.
Naked breasts, raised fist, the young woman multiplied in 2008 the actions undertaken against the Ukrainian government corrupt alongside her friends Anna Hutsol and Aleksandra Shevchenko, giving birth to the Femen movement. Exiled to France, she will continue her actions and commit suicide in Paris in 2008, at the age of 31.
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A powerful romantic fate
“Oksana was pure, absolute. She also had this trajectory at the Joan of Arc. She had everything of a romantic heroine, very powerful and inspiring, this mystical side, this crazy freedom, this artistic side (…). She had all these facets, who really make him a heroine of film”, underlines the director Charlene Favier in the show Vertigo of April 24.
>> Listen, the interview with Charlène Favier in Vertigo:
After the time of sketches and icons, the young artist will finally draw what will become the image of the femen today: naked twisted women, with slogans painted on the body, angry faces under their flowers of flowers. “Oxana” lingers on the artistic and intellectual journey of these women, political exiles and misunderstood when they arrived in France.
“It was important for me to show that they had demonstrated against Loukachenko, who is still in power today in Belarus, (…) against Putin. They did prison, they were tortured. When they arrived in France, we saw these beautiful young girls made up on high heels, and I think we did not realize what they had suffered. little patriarchal. [Nous avons vu] These women as seaman and not as real fighters (…) weakened by seven or eight years of battle (…) It was very important to show the radicality, the commitment, the courage they had, these girls, “said Charlene Favier.
Place for fiction
The film leaves room for fiction by inventing the last day of Oksana Chatchko in Paris on July 23, 2018, while going back and forth with the memories of the past.
After reading all the literature devoted to the Femen, the director met the relatives of Oksana, including her mother, without forgetting the director Chaux-de-Fonnier Alain Margot (died in 2023) who had already devoted the young woman the documentary “I am Femen” in 2014.
“It was very important to really break into intimacy, even if I think that with the film, I leave a part of mystery because it was an icon too, Oksana. But with fiction, we must really go into all the complexities of the character. The intimate people have lots of little secrets that they gave me with a lot of love and it is also for them that I made the film,” concludes Charlène Favier.
Interview by Anne Laure Gannac and Julie Evard
Adaptation Web: Melissa Härtel
“Oxana” by Charlène Favier, with Albina Korzh, Maryna Koshkina, Lada Korovai. To see in the French -speaking rooms from April 30, 2025.
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