CPH:DOX 2025: Exclusive GIRLS & GODS Poster Premiere

Can feminism and religion coexist, or are they fundamentally incompatible forces?

That’s the question at the heart of Girls & Gods, the new documentary from directors Arash T. Riahi and Verena Soltiz, with Ukrainian activist and former FEMEN leader Inna Shevchenko serving as the film’s writer, narrator, and catalyst.

Set to world premiere at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX, Girls & Gods arrives at a moment of global reckoning, when women’s rights, secularism, and faith continue to collide in complex and polarized ways. The film follows Shevchenko on an intimate, globe-spanning journey as she sheds the megaphone of protest in favor of dialogue, engaging in frank, challenging conversations with religious leaders, feminist theologians, and reformers across diverse traditions.

Girls & Gods becomes an evolution of activism, one that interrogates dogma, celebrates dissent, and dares to ask: what happens when women stop fighting religion and start reclaiming it?

“It’s about exploring my own self-doubts,” Shevchenko reflects. “After years of facing the world with defined statements, I realized I needed a new path.” Her transformation is the film’s pulse, raw and reflective.

Along the way, she meets figures like Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, as well as imams, rabbis, and Christian clergy, many of whom are women challenging the very systems they serve. Some reject religion outright. Others work from within to reform patriarchal structures. All, however, share a unifying belief: No god may strip women of their rights.