15/04/2025 - Charlène Favier traces the revolutionary and artistic existence of one of the founders of the Femen movement, full of courage and adversity, in a moving fiction film

“Our mission? Revolt. Our God? Woman. Our weapons? Our breasts.” 17 years have passed since three young Ukrainian women decided to name themselves the Femens before denouncing and defying, together with their followers, the corrupt and the tyrants such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and Belarusian Alexander Lukaschenko, through very spectacular happenings relayed by the media across the world. With hindsight, and as numerous events, from war to populist excesses gone haywire, continue to shake the earth, the causes then defended by the Femens, despite danger and at the cost of painful retaliation measures, now impose themselves as luminous and premonitory evidence.

It is to this story, in order not to forget, to pay homage and to remind of the virtues and the chasms of the fight for freedom, that Charlène Favier decided to dedicate her second feature following Slalom [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Charlène Favier
film profile] (Official selection Cannes 2020). With Oxana [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which will be released in French cinemas by Diaphana on 16 April, the filmmaker digs into the same archetypal, feminist and humanist furrow (the idealist enthusiasm and the ambivalence of a talented young heroine struggling with adversity) in a much larger and totally different context. For this time, it is a matter of life and death.

“I want to be free to choose my future,” “I want to change the world”. We are in 2008 in Khmelnytskyï, South-West of Kiev. 21-year-old student Oxana (Albina Korzh, a revelation), who also paints beautiful icons since her childhood, is organising the Femens’ first action together with her friends Lada (Lada Korovai) and Anna (Oksana Zhdanova): covered with fake blood, they shine a spotlight on the corruption in a hospital in which women are dying for lack of appropriate care. It’s the beginning of a high-adrenaline journey that will see them refine their provocative strategies, reach the Ukrainian capital, attract more and more media attention and support, become models in Western Europe, but also take bigger risks by defying very strong powers on their territory, who will counter-attack with a vengeance…

It is from Paris (where the young woman found refuge five years prior), on 23 July 2018, that Oxana’s Femen period plays out in flashbacks (and back-and-forths), from the infusion of the revolt to activist exaltation, from fear to disillusionment, from the common thread of painting to the solitude of exile. By drawing the portrait of a hypersensitive Joan of Arc, filmed up close, a rise-and-fall story, Charlène Favier doesn’t fully lift the veil on the enigma of Oxana’s internal struggle and electrifying and tragic fate (albeit despair can’t always be explained rationally) and she struggles also a little with a Paris section that feels less natural than the Ukraine episodes. Nevertheless, she manages to carve into cinema marble (with a beautiful score by Delphine Malaussena), and into the history of the most flamboyant female activists, the moving memory of a bold, creative and mystical young woman for whom “without struggle, there is no life anymore.”

Oxana was produced by Rectangle Productions and 2.4.7 Films, and co-produced by Hero Squared, France 3 Cinéma and Tabor LTD. Goodfellas is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)