A new documentary screened at the Venice Film Festival has revealed that the Ukrainian feminist group 'Femen' has been founded and run by a man named Victor Svyatski.
The group, who uses stripping as a tool to stage protests against sexual and political repression, runs with the slogan that claims their weapons are bare breasts.
The documentary titled 'Ukraine is not a Brothel', directed by 28-year-old Australian film-maker Kitty Green reveals that Svyatski is not simply a supporter of Femen but its founder and eminence grise.
Green said that it is Svyatski's movement and he hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers and get on the front page which became the way they sold the brand, the Independent reports.
According to the report, the documentary claims that the founder sent activists on one of their most terrifying missions to Belarus where they were arrested by secret service agents, stripped, humiliated and abandoned in a forest close to the Ukranian border.
Green was determined to shoot Svyatski and know how the organization was run and said that he was quite horrible with the girls and would scream at them and call them bitches.
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Svyatski sought to justify his role within the organisation and acknowledged the paradox of being a 'patriarch' running a feminist protest group and in the film said that these girls are weak.
One of the Femen campaigners talks of the relationship between the women and the movement's founder in the film as being akin to 'Stockholm syndrome', in which hostages feel sympathy for their captors and said that they are psychologically dependent on him.
