Jenna Marvin in Queendom (Greenwich Entertainment)

A whirring loneliness runs through the life of 21-year-old Jenna Marvin, a queer performance artist from Russia, in Agniia Galdanova’s bold and sobering documentary. Sometimes the profile is so beautifully crafted that it doesn’t feel like a run-of-the-mill nonfiction piece.

The opening zeroes in upon Jenna in one of her original, stark creations: dressed all in white; with high heels; white, monster-goth inspired make-up; and her signature shaved head, posing against the frozen landscape of the eastern Russian port of Magadan, where she was born and raised. Jenna reveals her keen artist’s eye—knowing exactly where to stand and suggesting to her friend taking the pictures how to capture the horizon on camera. Here, Jenna blends in with the landscape of her hometown—its grayish open skies and white snow—while also standing out individually in her own unique aesthetic.

Jenna expresses how happy it makes her feel going out in her outfits (“I’m on top of the world… I’m like a knight in armor”), even if it means getting harassed or reprimanded by police in the grocery store. While it may seem theatrical to don such provocative, socially unacceptable attire, Jenna is also not just performing, but wearing what she feels good in. “My characters may seem scary, but they’re not,” she says at one point. “The horrors I saw and experienced were much scarier than the costumes.”

Her disapproving grandparents still call her by her male birth name and encourage her to go to school and follow the conventional life of a Russian young man, including enlisting in the military. The grandfather is perturbed: Why Jenna is giving away all her artistry on TikTok, where she has amassed a following, without payment. Meanwhile, the grandmother refers to Jenna as “my little oddball.” Seemingly concerned out of love for Jenna, rather than what others think of themselves, they are more nuanced than one might expect. Yet their criticism of Jenna visibly hurts her to her core.

The documentary begins slightly before the Ukraine invasion. We overhear news of the impending conflict in the background on the radio. In in the aftermath of the arrest of Alexei Navalny, protestors in Moscow, including Jenna—tightly wrapped in in the colors of the Russian Federation flag with chunky, glittery red high heel boots—march on the streets. In a silent protest against the Ukraine invasion, Jenna takes to the street as well, donning body paint, wrapped in barbed wire. All face prison time for their defiance. Jenna’s performance art, shared widely on social media, offers a glimpse to others around the world a glimpse of resistance within a homophobic country.

The documentary also creates its own intermittent short films, with distorted synth music and the use of slow-motion featuring Jenna writhing within a desert, before cutting, in contrast, to the banal: the end of a long Moscow plane ride to Magadan. One feels both the claustrophobia of Russia, and also, as a landscape, its vastness.

Galdanova’s film, no doubt a brave feat given the location and subject matter, is evocative and slowly paced, showing rather than telling. It focuses less on the painful past Jenna infers and more upon the possibilities, and feels as if this is only the beginning of her story. It’s a brief portrait of a few years in Jenna’s life, yet it feels complete, especially visually.