This article analyzes gender representations of Chechen veiled women and masked men in the Terror in Moscow documentary, an account of the October 2002 Chechen rebel siege of a Moscow theater. Because the documentary is novel in its use of original footage recorded during the siege, it provides several issues to discuss related to objective accounts versus constructed reality in nonfiction films and how gender representations fit into mediated reality. As part of the “circuit of culture,” the documentary follows dominant notions of what it means to be feminine and masculine in the media. By deconstructing the documentary's structure and analyzing the ideological representations of gender, the analysis reveals that film represents female and male rebels differently by questioning and attempting to explain women's involvement while accepting men's involvement as “natural.”
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