Screening Sanctity: Matilda, the Politics of Offense and Moral Values in Russia’s Public Religion

This paper examines “film as a medium of religious experience and moral imagination” in contemporary Russia through the legal–moral politics of “insulting religious feelings.” Using the controversy over Aleksei Uchitel’s Matilda (2017) as a case study, it analyzes how the portrayal of Nicholas II’s premarital romance was construed as sacrilegious and mobilized by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and State actors to police the boundaries of the sacred and public morality. Read alongside the Pussy Riot (2012) and Tannhäuser (2015) scandals, the case illuminates how claims of offense structure ROC-Kremlin bargaining over “traditional values”, showing how these values are articulated through references to Romanov memory and the sacralized figure of Nicholas II. Drawing on ROC statements, appeals to historical memory, and State responses to protests, the article reassesses what the film, and its reception, reveal about Church-State equilibrium in post-Soviet Russia.