In St. Petersburg, bitch really is the new black. Attractive and accomplished women enroll in the Vixen Academy to learn how to “turn off their heads” around men and dance like strippers for imaginary sugar daddies. Head tutor Volodya browbeats the pupils, making explicit the institute’s retrograde (and unrealistic) philosophy: “get men to like you and you won’t have to work a day in your life.” It would be all too easy to condemn the entire enterprise, yet Alina Rudnitskaya’s observant camera and subtle editing reveal that, for these troubled women, self-respect was the first casualty of capitalism, Russian-style.  MP