On November 16, 2023, Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist, poet and musician, appeared in court to give what in the Russian judicial system is called the “last word”—the final words of the accused before the judge pronounces his sentence. Skochilenko, inside the metal cage where defendants are held during trials, said her case was so “strange and ridiculous” that it was like an April Fool's joke, as if “confetti would start falling from above.”
A version of the speech appears near the end of the short film “Extremist” by Russian director Alexander Molochnikov, who now lives in New York. The film reimagines the so-called crime that made Skochilenko famous, embodying both the brutality of Putin's system and the courage of the few who would risk their fate and freedom to oppose it. “Even though I’m behind bars, I’m freer than you,” Skochilenko tells the judge. “I can make my own decisions and say what I think.” She adds: “Maybe that’s why the state is so afraid of me and people like me, and keeps me in a cage like a dangerous animal.”
Almost two years earlier, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Skochilenko replaced price tags in a St. Petersburg supermarket with various anti-war messages: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol, where about 400 people sought refuge” and “Putin has been lying to you on television for 20 years. The result of these lies is our willingness to accept war and senseless death.”
This act of guerrilla performance was noticed by a customer at the store, a seventy-six-year-old retiree, who reported the new tags to the police. (The woman, Galina Baranova, told a Russian news site: “I’m proud of what I did. Isn’t it shameful to see a crime and just turn away?”) An investigation worthy of an extremist followed: Officers reviewed CCTV footage from the store and tracked down Skochilenko, accusing her of spreading “deliberately false information” about the actions of the Russian military. After she made her final plea in court, the judge sentenced her to seven years in prison.
Molochnikov told me that the film is not intended to be a documentary or even based on Skochilenko’s story, but rather, in his words, “inspired” by it. One of the key artistic interpretations is that in the film, Skochilenko, who lives with her partner Sonya, lives in the same apartment building as Baranova. The three of them have a pleasant, neighborly relationship: in one scene, they greet each other and discuss an afternoon mushroom picking in the forest. At first, Baranova does not know who she denounced; when she finds out that it is Skochilenko, she is overcome by remorse and tells the police: “They are decent girls.” But her attitude towards them hardens over time. The price stunt, she says in court, was a “well-planned and cynical” attack. “She's to blame.”
The closeness of Skochilenko and her accuser heightens the film's sense of tragedy, an almost random encounter and destruction of lives – a phenomenon that could happen with terrifying ease in wartime Russia. “The careless actions of one person, and then the other together, lead to disaster,” Molochnikov told me.
This feeling of closeness, physical closeness combined with deep moral disunity, is a broader metaphor for those in Russia who hold anti-war views. Molochnikov told me how, in the days after the invasion, he was filming a television series in a small town in the Vologda region, hundreds of miles from Moscow. He got along well with the locals. “We drank tea together, talked about all sorts of things not related to war or politics – it was quite pleasant and warm.” But he saw that they supported the war. The friendly hotel receptionist spent the day listening to Vladimir Solovyov, a particularly vicious pro-war media figure and propagandist. “We had so much in common,” Molochnikov recalled. “But there was still a huge gap between us.”
The fate of the director and his main character has taken a number of unexpected turns over the past few years. When Molochnikov wrote the script, Skochilenko was behind bars in Russia. But in August 2024, a week before he left for Riga to shoot the film, she was released in a massive prisoner exchange between Russia and several Western countries. (Russia has released more than a dozen political prisoners, including American journalist Evan Gershkowitz.)
