26/03/2025 - The duo of directors talk about working together with their protagonist, activist Inna Shevchenko, and what it took to make a film out of conversations

(© ORF/AÖF)

Directors Arash T Riahi and Verena Soltiz share insights into the making of Girls and Gods [+see also:
interview: Arash T Riahi, Verena Soltiz
film profile], their film competing for the HUMAN:RIGHTS Award at CPH:DOX. In it, feminist activist Inna Shevchenko, of the Ukrainian FEMEN collective, seeks answers about the role of religion in female body politics through candid conversations with priests, imams, rabbis and other activists.

Cineuropa: When did you meet Inna for the first time, and how did you decide to collaborate on this film?
Arash T Riahi: I met Inna in 2012, when we made a documentary called Everyday Rebellion, about non-violent forms of protest, and we stayed in contact. One day, she told me that after several years of radical protest, she realised that there are a lot of women who see themselves as feminists, but who are part of religious communities and want to stay in them. She said she would like to make a film about reaching out to “the other side” after she had already written several books on the relationship between religion and the female body.

Verena Soltiz: When Inna and Arash approached me with this project, I immediately recognised its historical relevance for the whole world because religion is the main reason for conflicts in our world right now. Until now, this has been a discussion held behind closed doors, and we want to bring it to a broader audience with Girls and Gods.

How do you make a film out of conversations, while making such good use of visuals and music? What was your overall aesthetic approach?
VS: We’ve always said it’s a debate film and not a classical interview. Inna is challenging people’s points of view, so the edit got a little complicated because you have a lot of talking heads, and you have to find a way through the story which will be fluent. Since there’s a philosophically complex topic at the core of the film, we wanted art to join the conversation and the artists to have their voices included.

ATR: It was clear that there would be a lot of talking, but also that we wanted to make a punk-ish documentary that would be full of life because these women are so great and are just that – full of life! So that's when we decided it would be better to let the arts communicate with each other, rather than imposing a style on it. We wanted to make an uplifting film. We know how much suffering there is, so we wanted to celebrate women’s empowerment and give some space to all of these women who are actually revolutionising our society within their religions.

Inna must have brought a lot of research with her already, also through her work in activism, but when it came to finding the other contributors, how did that work, logistically?
VS: We had a big list of women we wanted to talk to, but after we started work on the film in 2018, the world changed. Inna brought in a lot of people, and then we tried to strike a balance between the three religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. We searched online, got in touch with them beforehand, and then drove to meet them in person.

So many of the perilous developments in world history and politics are inscribed on bodies: women’s, black, trans, queer or soldiers’ ones. Yet you don’t try to chart the political developments in the last seven years through your film.
ATR: Well, the political timeline is changing permanently. Religion is something universal that doesn't alter from one day to the next – the interpretations of it don't change because a new political party is in charge, right? So, in order to make a film that is universal, we had to avoid this. In a way, it was not important whether Trump was already in office or not: he was not in place when we shot last year, but the March for Life and the sentiments remain the same.

VS: Think about how Putin was criticised by FEMEN and Pussy Riot more than ten years ago! Nobody foresaw what was going to happen, and unfortunately, history came full circle.