The first public screening in Russia of a documentary about the activist group Pussy Riot was canceled by the government at the last minute on Saturday, organizers said.

The film, “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” was to have been screened in Moscow on Sunday afternoon, less than a week after two members of Pussy Riot were released from prison. Their two-year sentence, on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for performing a protest song in a Moscow cathedral, was commuted under an amnesty from the Kremlin on Monday.

But on Saturday, the directors of the Gogol Center, a state-financed theater, received a call from the authorities threatening their jobs if they screened the documentary, said Maxim Pozdorovkin, who directed the film with Mike Lerner. A letter from the Department of Culture in Moscow formally banning the screening followed.

The letter, which was posted online by one of the center’s directors, accused the artists and filmmakers involved of being provocateurs, and said their brand of culture had no place in a government building.