Extremist (2025)

“Sasha” (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) has a secret from her girlfriend “Sonja” (Tina Dalakishvilli). She prints off labels at home with revealing facts about Russian army abuses in Ukraine, and then sticks them onto groceries in the supermarket. When their eighty-six year old neighbour “Galina” (Lilyan Malkina) happens upon one when buying her sugar, she dutifully reports it to the police who fairly swiftly apprehend their culprit. The policeman advises her to plead stupidity and hope for probation, else she could be facing eight years in jail. A bit of humiliating strip searching and a conversation with “Sonja” might make her take that route, or might she put faith in the justice system that surely can’t jail her for sticking labels on four items? For all it is fifteen minutes long, it doesn’t really manage to make much impact on the subject that matters. There’s lots of frolicking about, but when it gets to the sharp end it hurries through what ought to have been the potent part of the film and leaves us with a text slide to tell us what happened. It portrays a sad indictment of a system that penalises somethong so trivial so heavily, however, and I didn’t know that the heart-hand symbol is banned in Russia.