Penal Colony No. 2. A girl in a green coat. Red splashes of fireworks against the night sky. She arrives back in Moscow: photographers, a clamour of questions, what is it like to be free? Meetings, cops, her little six-year-old son with a sparkler, a video being recorded, her mother nearby, anxious.

Like the flickering, scratchy lens of a film projector, Maria Alyokhina’s Political Girl illuminates the story of her life from the moment she and the other members of Pussy Riot were let out of prison in 2013 until, in 2022, she finally fled Russia disguised as a delivery driver. Nine years of fighting the slowly tightening noose of Putin’s regime with an endless, almost crazed persistence. Again and again the group plan protests, race around trying to avoid the police long enough to carry

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