The ritual may be familiar, but nothing else about the scene — from its setting to its stakes — is ordinary. The backdrop behind Jenna is a sweeping expanse of ice and snow in a small Russian port town called Magadan. Jenna is dressed in drag, but not drag of the Rupaul’s Drag Race variety; her drag has been referred to as “creature drag.” Her signature white face paint, platform heels and surrealist costumes, with their exaggerated sculptural proportions and use of duct tape and repurposed items, catches the ire of her neighbors and the love of online admirers alike. Jenna eventually accrued a following on social media for her public and technically illegal drag performances, which often involved little more than her walking or being in public spaces but nevertheless were often met with abuse and threats of imprisonment.
But when Agniia first encountered Jenna, she hadn’t yet reached the level of virality that would eventually come in the years to follow. The filmmaker was researching different drag performers in Russia for her sophomore project, which she thought would be a docuseries, when she heard from a friend about a young drag queen from Magadan. “I was like, this is impossible. I have to meet this person,” Agniia remembers. “And I could not actually go meet her because I was in Moscow and she was in Saint Petersburg, so I sent a friend of mine with whom I’d been studying with in film school, and she went and filmed the sample.” The simple video, showing Jenna and her friend getting dressed up for a party, struck something in Agniia. The drag was an earlier, more prototypical version of the style Jenna is now known for; less duct tape and ornamentation, but still that signature striking makeup. “Something sparked. I knew I just had to stick to this feeling,” Agniia says. She decided to turn the docuseries into a documentary solely focused on Jenna.
Around that time, the entire world came to a grinding halt: the onset of COVID-19 pandemic had just led to lockdowns around the globe. With only a couple thousand followers on social media at that point in time, Jenna had tried to branch out and connect with other drag artists in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but faced rejection; her drag was extremely unconventional, and not even other drag artists quite understood it. “I think we found each other at the right moment, because nobody knew what to do, how to cope with all this,” Agniia says. “Jenna was saying that she was lost, and she also didn't know how to develop her art next.”
Unlike some of the other artists Agniia had initially researched, Jenna didn’t need much convincing to allow the camera into her life. “[Especially] after COVID came, there wasn't really [any] drag in my life,” Jenna recounts when I speak to her later over Zoom. “I realized that what drag is for me is not just a costume, a dress, something that you leave, that you take off and then in the dead of the night you put back on. Later, I understood that this is who I am, that I am art and I am drag, and that this is way bigger and more important than just clothing or costume.”
