Shelf Films as a New Phenomenon in Belarusian Culture:

An Artist’s Reflections on the cases of Kupala and Liberté

Author

Andrei Kureichik

Abstract

This essay examines Belarusian ‘shelf films’: completed films denied distribution or public existence. Two cases anchor the analysis: Kupala (Vladimir Yankovskiy [Uladzimir Iankoŭski], 2020, Belarus), a state-funded biopic withheld from release after the 2020 political crisis, and Liberté (Andrei Kureichik [Andrėi Kurėǐchyk], 2020–2026, Belarus), an independent drama completed despite police searches. Drawing on the author's experience as screenwriter, producer, and director, the essay reconstructs the censorship apparatus, from self-censorship and ideological gatekeeping to police raids, that turns politically sensitive films into Schrödinger's artefacts: existing yet inaccessible. Unlike its Soviet precedent, contemporary shelving does not merely withhold films; it denies distribution certificates, blocks online access, and deploys state security forces against the material conditions of filmmaking itself.

Keywords

Belarus, Vladimir Yankovskiy (Uladzimir Iankoŭski), Andrei Kureichik (Andrėi Kurėǐchyk), cinema, political censorship, shelf films, Kupala, Liberté, national identity, cultural decolonisation, political repression, Belarusfilm, dissident art, post-Soviet authoritarianism, 2020 Belarusian protests.

I begin this essay with a faint shudder not because the subject is exotic, but because it forces me back into my own collisions with Belarusian censorship. I am writing about situations that I as an artist find viscerally repellent. I am a Belarusian playwright, screenwriter, and director who spent two decades living and working under a dictatorship that tightened year by year. So I can speak about censorship not only as an observer, but as someone it has directly harmed. The shelved films discussed below constitute an exemplary case of Soviet and post-Soviet modes of censorship. Moreover, this phenomenon still presents an unresolved challenge for film scholars and future audiences. It is Schrödinger’s cat in art: the film seemingly exists and at the same time, seemingly does not.

Of course, the censorship of art is not an invention of Alexander Lukashenka (Aliaksandr Lukashėnka) or his officials. The history of censorship is as long, and as varied, as the history of art itself. The idea of the artist’s truly unrestricted freedom of expression is, by historical standards, a recent development. It emerged only when other basic human liberties were recognised in the societies we now call democratic. Censorship has never stopped the evolution of art. For most of history, artists learned to create inside the rules of the political, economic, and ideological systems they happened to live in. And yet masterpieces were made under the despotic rule of popes; playwrights wrote for mad emperors; architects built grandeur for autocrats. Filmmakers, too, have managed to produce extraordinary work inside totalitarian systems: Stalin’s, Putin’s, Lukashenka’s.

In many societies censorship has been accepted, indeed, and is still accepted as a social norm, an ordinary and ‘natural’ framework for public life. But I will not disappear into a general history of censorship here. My aim is narrower: to describe a very specific case of making art and of attempting self-expression under Belarus’s political censorship in the twenty-first century.

To do that, I need to say a few words about myself, not out of vanity, but because my experience is what gives this account its vantage point. I began working professionally in theatre in 2000, and in film in 2005. Over the next twenty years I built what, by Eastern European standards, would be called a successful career: more than 150 productions of my plays in major theatres across the former Soviet space – from the Moscow Art Theatre to the national theatres of Belarus and Ukraine – and more than thirty feature films, first as a screenwriter and later as a director. According to Internet Movie Database (IMDb), those films grossed more than 190 million dollars in the Eastern European markets, and they are familiar to audiences in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the post-Soviet world. Working across several markets at once gave me an unusual comparative lens: I was able to watch different models of state intervention and censorship up close, and to recognise a distinct, carefully engineered Belarusian version – one that the Lukashenka regime has been building since 1996.

Lukashenka came to power on a wave of nostalgia, promising to resurrect the Soviet Union inside a single former republic. He pursued that project with real enthusiasm, but he copied only selected parts of the Soviet system. The easiest to restore were the symbolic elements: the coat of arms, the anthem, the late-Soviet aesthetic, and the old names (ispolkom, khudsovet, KGB).

The economic model, by contrast, had little in common with the Soviet one. When we speak about the Soviet model, we have to remember that the Soviet Union did not exist in a single, stable form. It went through wildly different phases – sometimes so different they were nearly opposites. The late Soviet Union, for instance, became one of the freer societies of its time in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost loosened almost overnight what had long been tightly controlled, and within a few short years, the harsh machinery of cinematic censorship that had governed earlier decades suddenly became powerless. Filmmakers, hungry for air, did not merely test the limits; they broke them.

The “khudsovety” – artistic councils composed of loyal filmmakers, Party ideologues, and government officials – collapsed like medieval fortresses under the assault of a modern army. By the end of the 1980s, Soviet directors were no longer shy about criticising the Party, the social order, the country itself, and the men who ran it; some did so with a brutality that was almost gleeful. That wave of cinematic dissent, it is hard not to think, helped speed the Soviet Union’s collapse. But it was only a brief flare of freedom. For more than sixty-five years before Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was, in many respects, an emblematic case of political censorship. Emblematic, of course, in the darkest sense of the word.

Beginning in 1996, Lukashenka set about restoring Soviet techniques and habits of political control, adapting them to the new Belarus. In the Soviet Union, an ‘echeloned’ system of censorship had been built as early as the 1920s – a multi-tiered structure designed to make genuinely oppositional cinema almost impossible. The first tier was always self-censorship. The terror of the 1930s taught artists what a single careless word could cost. Misread a scene, phrase something the wrong way, and you could be crushed. As a result, many filmmakers began policing themselves at the level of the idea: at the stage of the initial concept, the first outline, the script itself, even the application to produce a film. They tried to protect themselves not only from a ban but from something more dangerous – being branded a troublemaker, an opportunist, “vrag naroda” [an “enemy of the people”].

The next level was the Party apparatus, which inspected art for ideological correctness: fidelity to Lenin and Stalin, alignment with the Party line of the moment, and whatever the current five-year plan demanded. The Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (TsK VKP[b])approved production plans for Soviet feature and documentary films. The most important films were often screened personally for Stalin and senior Party officials before release, and these screenings could determine whether a film was approved, revised, delayed, or banned.

After that came the formal filter of the “khudsovety”, where, in theory, colleagues and professionals decided which films should go into production, but in practice, officials set the tone and the boundaries. These councils were supposed to guard against incompetence and mediocrity, against amateurishness and hackwork. Yet the Soviet system produced an enormous amount of precisely that. The councils’ real pressure fell, again and again, on the truly gifted: the people Soviet cinema needed for its international reputation, like Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksei German, Sergei Parajanov, but whom it wanted to keep in iron gloves: endless discussions, restrictions, approvals, revisions.

At the very top of this pyramid sat the country’s political leadership. In the Soviet case, it is well known that Stalin personally watched films and delivered verdicts that could determine not only a picture’s fate but the fate of the people who made it. Lukashenka, too, was never above this kind of direct intervention. He made personal decisions both to greenlight and to suppress an entire range of film projects.

I will never forget a day in early March of 2020, when I drove to an upscale neighbourhood on the eastern edge of Minsk, to the home of the director Vladimir Yankovskiy (Uladzimir Iankoŭski). Yankovskiy comes from a celebrated acting dynasty. His father, Rostislav Yankovsky (Rastsislaŭ Iankoŭski), was a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, a member of the Supreme Soviet of Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, and, by any measure, one of the most influential figures in Belarusian theatre and film. His uncle, Oleg Yankovsky (Aleh Iankoŭski), also a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, was a widely adored star, a fixture of Soviet cinema at its most iconic.

Vladimir Yankovskiy himself had once been a pioneer of independent video production. His company, Irreal Films, became a studio where Soviet, Russian, and Belarusian stars shot their music videos, and he was widely regarded as one of the best music video directors in the post-Soviet world. But that was the 1990s. In the 2000s, Yankovskiy directed Russian television series while dreaming of something larger – something serious, ambitious, unmistakably his own. And then, improbably, such a project landed in his hands. That day I came to see the film Kupala (Vladimir Yankovskiy, 2020, Belarus) – a national project of the state studio Belarusfilm, devoted to what is likely the central figure in Belarusian literature and culture of the first half of the twentieth century: the poet and playwright Yanka Kupala (Ianka Kupala).

Yanka Kupala (b. Ivan Lutsevich [Ivan Lutsėvich]) is a figure both emblematic and tragic for Belarus. His life, which began in 1888, reads like an immaculate piece of dramaturgy. First, he managed to become one of the fathers of the Belarusian national revival, pushing back against Russian imperial power with lines of poetry that turned into slogans, and with essays that carried the charge of a civic manifesto. Later, Kupala’s name appeared among the intellectuals who supported the creation of the Belarusian People’s Republic in 1918. And his life ended, as if on cue, in catastrophe: in 1942 he fell down a stairwell in a Moscow hotel – an accident, officially, though many accounts insist he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). At the time of his death he was, in a grotesque twist, a First-Class Stalin Prize laureate and the first officially anointed poet of Soviet Belarus.

And now this biopic had just returned from Prague, where the Barrandov Studios had produced the final sound remastering. I was probably among the first to see the finished, fully mixed version – a film on which the Belarusian state had spent roughly one and a half million dollars, and which has still never been officially shown to a Belarusian audience.

Why?

My connection to the film was not only my friendship with Yankovskiy. It was also that I had recommended one of its screenwriters to him – Aliaksandra Barysava, with whom I began my own artistic life back in the theatre studio of the Faculty of Philology at the Belarusian State University twenty-five years ago. It was she who helped make the film so sharp, so layered, so culturally consequential, which, in a country like ours, is often another way of saying: doomed. I also appear in the film as an actor, playing the ‘suitor’ of Kupala’s beloved, the actress Paŭlina Miadziolka. And my son, Hleb Kureichik (Hleb Kurėichyk), is in it too: he plays one of Kupala’s friends in his adolescence.

Vladimir Karachevsky (Uladzimir Karachėŭski), general director of the Belarusfilm studio. Photo from the author’s personal archive.

The very fact that such a project was launched can be called a minor miracle. I had seen an early version of the script written by Alena Kaliunova on the desk of the culture minister at the time Pavel Latushka as far back as 2010. It was even harder to imagine a film like this coming out of the state studio Belarusfilm, which people joked about as “Partisanfilm”, because since Soviet days its main occupation had been war pictures about the Second World War, known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War.

But this time something improbable aligned. For several years before the 2020 election, Lukashenka tried to reinvent himself as a friend of the Belarusian intelligentsia – a ‘popular, liberal dictator’, a sovereign who supposedly granted artists freedoms the way Enlightenment-era patrons once did with Diderot, Rousseau, Mozart, and Pushkin. He also worked hard to appear nationally minded, a custodian of Belarusian statehood. The late 2010s were a strange interval, when several culturally nationalist projects were, somehow, allowed to go forward. Culturally nationalist projects are understood here not in terms of political nationalism, but primarily as an idea of cultural decolonisation and the restoration of a national narrative in Belarusian cinema and culture. Kupala was one of those projects.

To begin with, it was shot in Belarusian – something close to an anomaly in a film industry built largely with the Russian market in mind. And it was about the Belarusian intelligentsia’s real resistance to the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The film stages the Minsk uprising of 1905 with startling clarity: soldiers firing into a crowd, a revolt crushed in public. It shows the work of the newspaper Nasha Niva, which remains one of the most oppositional media in Belarus up to the present day, and has been declared an “extremist” formation by Lukashenka.¹ The film depicts Belarusian poets, playwrights, and writers of the early twentieth century: Yakub Kolas (Iakub Kolas), Tishka Hartny (Tsishka Hartny), Yadvigin Sh. (Iadvihin Sh.), the Lutskevich brothers (Anton & Ivan Lutskevich), Alaiza Pashkevich (known under her nom de plume Tsiotka), and others who rejected the ‘Russian imperial world’ and dreamed of an independent Belarus without the usual evasions. Belarusfilm, in its entire history, had never produced anything that was simultaneously so Belarusaphilic, anti-colonial and, in effect, oppositional.

Soviet Belarusian cinema, despite sharing many features with other Soviet studios, nevertheless possessed a distinctive and recognisable authenticity. Although Belarusfilm enjoyed a strong reputation within the Soviet cinematic landscape, its thematic and generic specialisation remained relatively narrow, focusing primarily on films about the Second World War and children’s cinema. These same trends persisted after the collapse of the Soviet Union, supplemented by a range of melodramatic and detective television series produced for the Russian market. Against this background, the emergence of high concept national project devoted, in effect, to the very idea of Belarusian nationhood came as a bolt from the blue.

And yet the state funded it at an unprecedented scale. One and a half million US dollars: much more than many other films made in independent Belarus. Kupala was played by a Latvian actor with Belarusian roots Nikolay Shestak (Mikalaĭ Shastak), and most of the roles went to actors from the Kupalauski Theatre – a national theatre company long known for its proud disdain for Lukashenka and its stubborn opposition to dictatorship. That defiance became unmistakable in 2020, and it ultimately cost the entire company not only their jobs but open political and criminal persecution.

With state money, Yankovskiy made what no one expected him to make: a piercing manifesto of Belarusian national culture, unmistakably anti-imperial in its convictions. The film was supposed to be released in 2020 (Euroradio 2020), but that year Lukashenka’s relationship with society changed – suddenly, irrevocably. Massive protests against the rigged August 2020 presidential election brought a full-scale assault on independent culture, independent media, and independent education. A film like Kupala (especially one financed by the state, no less) acquired an entirely different meaning, a different scale. It exposed a truth that could no longer be papered over: Belarus was in the hands of a tyranny, a barbaric regime that has declared war on its own national language, culture, and art (Antaniuk-Prouteau 2022). Belarus was under threat of absorption by Russia and its neo-imperial ambitions. Belarusian artists and cultural workers were being subjected to harsh political persecution and repression amid the jeering of Putin’s and Lukashenka’s propagandists about a supposed surge of rabid nationalism, which stands in the way of reuniting a ‘single Russian people of Russia and Belarus’. Strikingly, that entire reality was already metaphorically present in the film. And, quite literally, in what happened to the film after August 2020, when Lukashenka, having lost the election to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (Sviatlana Tsikhanoŭskaia), chose to remain in power through violent repression and the large-scale suppression of political dissent, with the support of the Putin regime. All of this can be seen in Kupala, spoken in the Belarusian language.

The film’s visionary force was so powerful that the 2020 election signed Kupala’s death sentence. Its official premieres were cancelled. The film was even withdrawn from some international festivals (e.g. Eurasian Film Festival 2021 in London) (Sagatis 2021). The only public screening of Kupala took place in Moscow Dom Kino [House of Cinema] through personal connections, at a small, little-known festival called Moskovskaia Premʹera [Moscow Premiere] on 14 November 2020 and due to coronavirus restrictions, the hall was allowed to be filled to only a quarter of its capacity (ONT 2020).

The state shelved the film; despite the one and a half million dollars it had spent to make it. Whereas in the Soviet period films were quite literally shelved in studio vaults and film archives, in the contemporary digital era ‘shelving’ signifies something different: the film was not allowed into distribution: it was denied release in cinemas, streaming and on television, and no official copy was made available online. In effect, the film remained locked away on the hard drives of the Belarusfilm archives. But the films do not climb onto a shelf by themselves; someone puts them there.

In the Belarusian cultural landscape of the 2000s, there is a particular figure many people name as an architect of a systematic censorship regime, someone I encountered more than once in my own professional life. I mean Irina Driga (Iryna Dryha), a state official who rose through the ideological apparatus and later held senior posts in the Ministry of Culture, becoming, for years, one of the most consequential gatekeepers in the Belarusian cultural sphere. However, Driga was herself embedded in a broader process of the Belarusian state’s return to Soviet modes of administration and political authoritarianism. This system was structured across multiple levels, from the most local and provincial to the upper reaches of Lukashenka’s administration. It relied on Soviet remnants that had never been fully eradicated, both in bureaucratic practice and in aesthetic form. In this regard, Driga was less an autonomous agent than a functionary and embodiment of the system.

Beginning in the early 2000s, first within the ideological apparatus of Lukashenka’s presidential administration and later in the Ministry of Culture, where Driga held a succession of senior posts (from first Deputy Minister of Culture to the head of key departments within the ministry, including the film division), she helped turn state censorship into something systematic: layered, routinised, bureaucratically efficient. It began, in the public imagination, with the notorious cultural ‘blacklists’ of 2011 – an unspoken ban that quietly pushed certain Belarusian musicians and cultural figures, deemed politically ‘unreliable’, out of broadcast media and off major concert stages. Then the Belarusian theatre world felt the tightening: productions were expected to pass through commissions before premieres; touring became permission-based. Artists’ access to audiences could hinge on a piece of paper – those infamous touring permits, the ‘gastrolki’, that functioned as a filter for ideologically unwelcome non-state productions and concerts (state cultural institutions were exempt from the requirement to obtain these permits). The technical administration of such certificates was entrusted to local departments of culture attached to municipal executive committees [Ispolkom], themselves incorporated into the centralised system of the Ministry of Culture. The executive committees fulfilled a comparable function during the Soviet period as well, although at that time they operated through the structures of the Communist Party and “khudsovety”. Under Lukashenka, by contrast, this role was assumed by ideological departments. Thus, the decision whether to authorise or prohibit a particular performance, concert, or public event was effectively placed in the hands of local ideologists and cultural bureaucrats.

Later came a separate mechanism for cinema. The Ministry of Culture centralised in its own hands the full authority to issue permits: the Department of Cinema was now tasked with issuing distribution certificates. A special Commission for the Prevention of the Promotion of Pornography, Violence, and Cruelty effectively controlled all types of film distribution and festival selection, including which Belarusian and international films could appear at Listapad – a major Belarusian Film Festival that hosted a national film competition. This consolidation of censoring power also endowed an official like Driga with more leverage. In the theatre and film community, stories circulated about scripts being returned covered in blunt corrections from Deputy Minister of Culture Driga. Over time, through her influence over public funding and approvals, Driga became, in practice, one of the most powerful officials in Belarusian culture, more consequential, many artists felt, than the nominal minister.

In an interview conducted for this article, Angelika Krasheuskaya (Anzhalika Krasheŭskaia), the director and general manager of the Listapad International Film Festival, characterised Irina Driga as a “hard-line ideological” censor who served Lukashenka with fanatical personal loyalty. Krasheuskaya observed that Driga’s interventions in the festival’s programming extended beyond efforts to censor Belarusian cinema and reached the international section whenever films engaged politically sensitive subjects for the Belarusian regime, including questions related to Crimea or Palestine. (Kureichik 2026)

One telling example of Driga’s censorship was the revocation of the distribution certificate for my comedy Party-zan film (Andrei Kureichik, 2016, Belarus) after just three days in theatrical release (Otto 2016) in response to the film’s critical portrayal of the state studio Belarusfilm (you remember that “Partisanfilm” is a nickname of Belarusfilm). On 23 January 2017, the Belarusian Ministry of Culture published on its website a statement by Irina Driga under the headline that clearly found inspiration from the Soviet bombastic rhetoric: “Belarusian Cinema Should Inspire Pride in the Country”. Driga claimed in her statement that

the rightsholder had initially submitted an unfinished version of the work. The premiere took place in late December 2016. However, complaints then began to arrive from localities [cinemas] stating that the rightsholder was supplying for distribution a version of the film whose running time differed from that indicated in the state registration certificate by 1 minute and 49 seconds. Viewing this as a violation, film distribution organisations suspended the screenings […]. Because the added fragment contained information that could be interpreted as advertising for sexually explicit products, the disc [with film] was submitted to the Republican Commission for the Prevention of the Promotion of Pornography, Violence, and Cruelty. (Driga 2017; my translation)

The commission took exactly as long as it needed to reach a decision for the film’s theatrical distribution contract to expire, and that decision was accompanied by a requirement that all elements considered objectionable by the Ministry of Culture must be removed. As the film’s co-producer, I was in direct contact with the cinemas and distributors. I can testify under oath that no such complaints were made by any of them and that the film’s running time did not change at all. Yet in the end, truth did not matter for the censoring mechanisms to kick into gear.

The attempt to refashion national cinema into seamless propaganda ultimately backfired: many films launched with official blessing failed to find an audience. Yet that failure did not soften the system’s instinct to block the films and the artists, whose talent did not fit the state’s ideological template, from reaching audiences.

And yet even this censorship apparatus, backed by the full weight of the state, could not entirely stop Kupala from being distributed, even though ‘underground’. Pirate copies circulated and became, paradoxically, one of the main ways Belarusian cinema travelled: a clandestine screening practice at home, and a kind of cinematic calling card for the Belarusian diaspora abroad (Euroradio 2021).

At the very same time that Kupala was being edited, dubbed, and mixed, I was deep in a ‘pushcha’ [national protected forest] near the Polish border, in the Hrodna region, shooting my own film, Liberté (Andrei Kureichik, 2020–2026, Belarus). These projects differed: one was a state-sponsored national megaproject, while the other was an intimate statement by an independent creative team. Nevertheless, both films became shelved art.

I made Liberté without state support not only because I refused, on principle, to collaborate with the Belarusian government or with Belarusfilm, but also because I did not want to spend my life negotiating with censors like Driga. The film was financed by private investors. And despite its bold title – Liberté, meaning “Freedom” – it was not a political project at all. It was closer to a philosophical drama. Almost a parable. The cast is small but shining, led by Sviatlana Anikei – a star of the Kupalauski Theatre of 2000s and the popular German actor Jean-Marc Birkholz. The film’s director of photography was Nikita Pinigin (Mikita Pinihin). Dmitry Friga (Dzmitry Fryha), one of the founding figures of creative collective Bez Buslou Arts, contributed as both composer and co-producer. Another key addition to the production team was co-producer Valeria Ledyaeva (Valeryia Liadziaeva), who was crucial in assembling a substantial budget for the project. The events of 2020 effectively ended the film careers in Belarus of all these talented individuals, as well as of hundreds of other Belarusian filmmakers.

The film is the story of a woman who has lost her teenage son to addiction and cannot forgive herself for it. She invents an alternate reality in which he is still alive: he is ‘hiding’ in the basement, fighting his dependency there, while she helps him, protecting him, controlling him, by refusing to let him outside. For the son, freedom becomes an obsession; he strains toward the world. When a German Interpol investigator arrives to look into the disappearances of the son, the woman’s fragile balancing act between two realities becomes almost impossible.

And yet, for all its intimacy, the story felt to me unmistakably Belarusian. For one thing, many Belarusians I knew valued inner freedom more than external freedom. They performed obedience to Lukashenka’s rules, while living, stubbornly, a private life that remained their own. And for another, a large part of Belarusian society itself lived inside a kind of invented world, failing to register the monstrous Putinist, geopolitical reality moving toward Belarus just as, earlier, it had moved toward Ukraine.

That habit of self-deception is our long practice of pretending, even to ourselves, that dictatorship could be managed without paying its full price. But it helped lead to the crushing defeat of the Belarusian revolution in 2020, and to consequences that have been devastating not only for Belarusian culture but for Belarusian society as a whole. One could speak, without exaggeration, of cultural genocide: not only these two films became victims, but countless real cultural workers as well. Some ended up in prison; among them the artist Ales Pushkin (Ales’ Pushkin), who was tortured to death there.² Others were driven into exile, or forced into a life of silence, cut off from the possibility of working at home.

Liberté met a fate no less grim than that of Kupala. Its sound recording and initial mix took place in the summer of 2020, the most dramatic summer of the Belarusian modern age. From the windows of the studio, you could see the protesters in the streets; sometimes we had to stop working altogether, because the shouting outside made it impossible to hear what we were doing. A teaser released in 2020 remains the only fragment of the film to reach the public (Bez Buslou Arts 2020). Any hope that a film titled Liberté – Freedom – would appear on Belarusian screens in 2020 was slim. Still, we held on to a different hope: that we might show it internationally. For that, after all, we did not need permission from the Ministry of Culture or from Belarusfilm. But even that proved impossible once the country tipped into emergency, and three of the film’s producers and makers were forced, within a matter of days, to leave Belarus in three different directions. Dmitry Friga went to Poland. Valeria Ledyaeva went to Latvia.

I flew to Ukraine on the day it became my turn to be arrested, after the abduction of members of the Coordination Council, Maksim Znak and Maria Kolesnikova (Maryia Kalesnikava), and after Nobel Prize Laureate Svetlana Alexievich (Sviatlana Aleksievich) and former minister of culture and director general of Kupalauski Theatre Pavel Latushka were forcibly driven into exile. The departure was so sudden that we did not manage to take the film’s hard drives with us. Our driver hid them in a garage: terabytes and terabytes of material – image, colour correction, sound – everything that, in the end, is the film.

We had to hide the film in the most literal sense. Our production company, Bez Buslou Arts - an independent film laboratory registered in my name – came under immediate surveillance and was effectively dismantled by the State Security Committee known as the KGB. At this point, the nature of censorship changed fundamentally. It was no longer a matter of ideological filtering orchestrated by bureaucrats such as Irina Driga, but rather direct intervention by the KGB under the leadership of its chairman, Ivan Tertel (Ivan Tsertselʹ). The focus shifted away from regulating content toward the physical suppression of dissent. Tactics such as raids, violence, threats to life, and politically motivated prosecutions became central to the state’s response. It was specifically for these severe measures - not for content moderation – that the European Union, the United States, and Canada imposed targeted sanctions on Tertel. In this context, the concept of censorship acquired a literal meaning: it was no longer about bureaucratic editing, but about utilizing state force to entirely eradicate independent film companies and media outlets along with their work.

My house was searched. My relatives’ homes were also searched. Documents, computers, storage devices were seized. But the hard drives were never found. They lay under a heap of junk for almost five years. Only in 2024 were we able to smuggle them out to Lithuania. From there, the material made its way to the United States, where by then I was at Yale as a lecturer and researcher. Now the film must be restored and finally shown to a wider audience.

Liberté became the last free uncensored feature film openly made by an independent company in Belarus. After 2020, censorship became absolute.

Both Kupala and Liberté are on the shelf now. They may remain there for decades. History of the Soviet Union offers plenty of precedents: films that sat for years, waiting for their moment. And yet, even under repression, terror, and censorship, art has an odd stamina: it can outwait the present and find its own, unexpected route to the viewer. Shelf cinema is still cinema. It has no festival laurels, no awards, no box office numbers to cite. But it has a different kind of distinction: an unusual capacity to mirror its era, not only through what it depicts, but through what happens to it. It is a phenomenon in its own right. Its value lies, in part, in the fact that these artefacts exist somewhere at all – like buried treasure, preserved for future generations of spectators. Many films in Belarus still await a moment of profound rebirth. One day, they will be metaphorically “taken off the shelf,” reinterpreted, and experienced anew in an emotional and intellectual process that will testify to the fact that art endured and continued to struggle even in the darkest of times. Belarusians will inevitably return to the rediscovery and recoding of their national cinematic heritage, and at that moment invisible now dissident films, regardless of their distributional or festival fate, will emerge as important elements of a new Belarusian cultural project – or, perhaps more precisely, of the cultural project of New Belarus.

Andrei Kureichik
University of Chicago
kureichik@uchicago.edu

Bio

Andrei Kureichik is a Belarusian playwright, film and stage director, and a member of the Coordination Council of Belarus, which was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament (2020). Andrei holds a Master’s degree in Law and Political Science from Belarusian State University and completed professional training in theatre directing in Moscow (2002), with an internship at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre under Oleg Tabakov. Among his most prominent works is the play Obizhennye. Belarus(siya) / Insulted. Belarus (2020), which has been translated into 29 languages and performed over 200 times worldwide. Kureichik is also a prolific filmmaker, with more than 30 film and television projects to his name. His academic interests include protest art in Soviet and post-Soviet Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, as well as Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. In 2022, Kureichik became an inaugural Belarusian Yale World Fellow. He is currently a Neubauer Fellow and PhD student in Slavic and Theatre Studies at the University of Chicago.

ORCID: 0009-0000-4203-2260

Bibliography

Antaniuk-Prouteau, Marina. 2022. “Status moŭ u Bielarusi: histaryčny ahliad [The Status of Languages in Belarus: A Historical Overview].” Acta Albaruthenica 22: 159–168, https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/29520984. DOI: 10.31338/2720-698Xaa.22.8

Bez Buslou Arts. 2020. “LIBERTÉ – Official Teaser.” YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKBHtWnCobk (Accessed: January 29, 2026).

Driga, Irina. 2017. “Belorusskoe kino dolzhno vyzyvatʹ gordostʹ za svoiu stranu” [“Belarusian Cinema Should Inspire Pride in the Country”], Ministerstvo kulʹtury Respubliki Belarusʹ, January 23, https://kultura.gov.by/news/irina-driga-belorusskoe-kino-dolzhno-vyzyvat-gordost-za-svoju-stranu-2677-2017/ (Accessed: January 29, 2026).

Euroradio. 2020. “Belorusskoe kino-2020: chto my uvidim v etom godu?” January 10. https://euroradio.fm/ru/belorusskoe-kino-2020-chto-my-uvidim-v-etom-godu (Accessed: January 29, 2026).

Euroradio. 2021. “Bolʹshe ‘Kupalu’ nikto ne videl: kto sdelal vid, chto natsionalʹnogo proekta net.” October 21. https://euroradio.fm/ru/bolshe-kupalu-nikto-ne-videl-kto-sdelal-vid-chto-nacionalnogo-proekta-net (Accessed: January 29, 2026).

Kureichik, Andrei. 2026. “Andrei Kureichik Interviews Angelika Krasheuskaya.” YouTube video, https://youtu.be/dN94yP59Mo8 (Accessed: January 29, 2026).

ONT (Obshchenatsionalʹnoe televidenie Belarusi). 2020. “Istoriya zhizni i tvorchestva glavnogo belorusskogo pesnyara: premʹera filʹma Kupala sostoyalasʹ”. https://ont.by/special/ru/culture-ru/view/istoriya-zhizni-i-tvorchestva-glavnogo-belorusskogo-pesnyara-premera-filma-kupala-sostoyalas-na-147650-2020 (Accessed: January 22, 2026).

Otto, Evika. 2016. “‘Party-zan filʹm’ posle khoroshego piara poluchil prokatnoe udostoverenie.” Komsomolskaia pravda–Belarus (KP.RU). December 21. https://www.kp.ru/daily/26622/3640192/ (Accessed: December 21, 2025).

Sagatis, M. D. 2021. “Kupala Falls Once Again,” OCA Magazine (October 2021): 30–31, https://mfa.tj/uploads/main/2021/10/OCA-Magazine-UK-23-10-2021.pdf (Accessed: January 22, 2026).

Viasna Human Rights Center. 2023. “Human Rights Community of Belarus Joint Statement on the Death in Custody of the Artist Ales Pushkin.” July 12. https://spring96.org/en/news/112189 (Accessed: July 3, 2026).

Filmography

Yankovskiy, Vladimir. 2020. Kupala. Belarusfilm.

Kureichik, Andrei. 2020–2026. Liberté. Bez Buslou Arts.

Kureichik, Andrei. 2016. Party-zan Film. Bez Buslou Arts.

Suggested Citation

Kureichik, Andrei. 2026. “Shelf Films as a New Phenomenon in Belarusian Culture: An Artist’s reflections through the cases of Kupala and Liberté”. Belarusian Cinema and the Protests of 2020: Cinema in Exile (ed. Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.425.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This licence does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms