On November 16, 2023, Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist, poet, and musician, stood in court to give what is known in the Russian judicial system as the “last word”—final remarks of the accused before the judge delivers a verdict. Skochilenko, from inside a metal cage, where defendants are confined during courtroom hearings, said her case was so “strange and ridiculous” that it felt like an April Fools’ joke, as if “confetti will start falling from above.”
A version of the speech appears near the end of “Extremist,” a short film by the Russian director Alexander Molochnikov, who now lives in New York. The film reimagines the so-called crime that made Skochilenko famous, an avatar for both the cruelty of Putin’s system, and the bravery of the few who would risk their fates and freedom to oppose it. “Even though I am behind bars, I am freer than you,” Skochilenko tells the judge. “I can make my own decisions and say what I think.” She adds, “Maybe that is why the state fears me and others like me so much and keeps me in a cage like a dangerous animal.”
Nearly two years earlier, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Skochilenko had replaced the price tags in a St. Petersburg supermarket with various antiwar messages: “The Russian Army bombed an art school in Mariupol where about 400 people were seeking shelter,” and “Putin has been lying to you from the television screen for 20 years. The result of these lies is our willingness to accept war and senseless deaths.”
That act of guerrilla performance art was noticed by a shopper at the store, a seventy-six-year-old retiree, who reported the new tags to police. (The woman, Galina Baranova, told a Russian news site, “I’m proud of what I did. Isn’t it a real disgrace to see a crime and just turn away?”) An investigation worthy of an extremist ensued: officers examined surveillance footage from the store and tracked down Skochilenko, charging her with the crime of disseminating “knowingly false information” about the actions of the Russian armed forces. After she delivered her last word in court, the judge sentenced her to seven years in prison.
Molochnikov told me that the film does not purport to be a documentary, or even based on Skochilenko’s story, but, rather, he said, “inspired” by it. One key artistic reinterpretation is that, in the film, Skochilenko—who lives with her partner, Sonya—resides in the same apartment building as Baranova. The three of them have pleasant, neighborly relations, saying hello and discussing, in one scene, an afternoon of mushroom picking in the woods. At first Baranova doesn’t know who she has denounced; when she learns it’s Skochilenko, she feels a pang of remorse, telling police, “They’re decent girls.” But her attitude toward them eventually hardens. The price-tag stunt, she says in court, was a “well-planned and cynical” attack. “She is guilty.”
The proximity of Skochilenko and her accuser heightens the film’s sense of tragedy, the almost accidental way that lives collide and shatter—a phenomenon that can happen with terrifying ease in wartime Russia. “The incautious actions of one person, and then a second, together lead to disaster,” Molochnikov told me.
That feeling of closeness, a physical proximity paired with a deep moral disconnect, is a broader metaphor for those in Russia with antiwar views. Molochnikov told me of how, in the days following 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, talking about all sorts of things, not connected to war or politics—it was quite pleasant and warm.” But he could see they supported the war. The friendly receptionist in the hotel listened to Vladimir Solovyov, a particularly noxious pro-war media personality and propagandist, all day. “We had so much in common,” Molochnikov recalled. “But there was a vast abyss between us all the same.”
The fates of the director and his protagonist have taken a number of unexpected turns in the past few years. When Molochnikov wrote the script, Skochilenko was behind bars in Russia. But in August, 2024, a week before he travelled to Riga to shoot the film, she was released in a large-scale prisoner exchange between Russia and several Western countries. (Russia freed more than a dozen political prisoners, including the American journalist Evan Gershkovich.)
