Under the Grey Sky (2024) by Mara Tamkovich

Author

I. Kh.

Abstract

The award-winning film [Pad shėrym nebam] / Pod szarym niebem / Under the Grey Sky (Mara Tamkovich 2024) is based on the real political persecution and imprisonment of a Belarusian journalist, Katsiaryna Andreyeva (Katsiaryna Andrėeva). The film review examines how this minimalist drama explores themes of moral choice, enduring love and hope against all odds in a harrowing political environment of post-2020 Belarus.

Keywords

Mara Tamkovich; Katsiaryna Andreyeva (Katsiaryna Andrėeva); Ihar Ilyash (Ihar Ilʹiash); Belarus; Minsk; 2020 protests; independent journalism; political prisoners; resistance; hope.

[Pad shėrym nebam] / Pod szarym niebem / Under the Grey Sky (Mara Tamkovich, 2024, Poland) is the debut feature film written and directed by Mara Tamkovich, a Polish-Belarusian filmmaker and former radio and TV journalist, who since 2006 has resided in Poland, where she graduated from the Warsaw Film School. The film was shot with a modest budget from the Polish Film Institute (250, 000 euros), and the entire production process was limited to the span of one year according to the terms of the contract (Tamkovich 2024). It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2024, travelled worldwide, and received several awards, among them the Best Debut Director at the Polish Film Festival in 2024, Special Mention at Torino Film Festival in 2024, Krzysztof Krauze Award for Best Director from the Directors Guild of Poland (2025), and the Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award for Best Fiction Feature Film and performances by the lead actors Valentin Novopolskij (Valiantsin Navapolʹski) and Aliaksandra Vaitsekhovich.

Under the Grey Sky is a continuation of the director’s reflections on the events in the aftermath of the rigged presidential elections in Belarus in August 2020 – a turning point in Belarusian history that gave rise to unprecedented mass protests in the country, on the one hand, and unprecedented violence and massive repressions – still ongoing – from Lukashenka’s regime, on the other. In 2022, Tamkovich made the award-winning short film [U zhyvym ėfiry] / Na żywo / Live, produced by the Wajda Film School together with Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF) and Belsat TV. The short focuses on two journalists, a reporter, Lena, and a cameraperson, Ola, who livestream from a residential apartment located above the Square of Changes (Ploshcha peramen) in one of Minsk’s neighbourhoods, where people gathered in solidarity to mourn the death of Raman Bandarenka, beaten to death by representatives of the repressive state apparatus.¹ This livestream opens Under the Grey Sky. While the short film focuses solely on the broadcast, Under the Grey Sky takes us on a painful journey through the aftermath of the livestream for which Lena is arrested, as well as her husband Ilʹia’s fight for her.

As the first shot of Under the Grey Sky announces, this story is based on true events – the same events on which Live is based. Lena’s prototype is Katsiaryna Andreyeva (Katsiaryna Andrėeva), Ola’s – Darya Chultsova (Dar’ia Chulʹtsova), both Belsat journalists,² and Ilʹia’s prototype is Ihar Ilyash (Ihar Ilʹiash), Katsiaryna’s husband. In November 2020, during the livestream documenting the peaceful gathering that was turned into a violent crackdown by the riot police, Katsiaryna and Darya were tracked with a drone and arrested; both were sentenced to two years in prison on charges of organising actions that grossly violated public order.³ Katsiaryna’s sentence was later increased while she was in prison; she was charged with high treason and sentenced again, this time to eight years.

Tamkovich’s film grounds its plot in these facts. The film starts with the livestream, followed by Lena and Ola’s arrest. The film then shifts focus: after the political protest, it turns to the story of the personal struggle and survival of two people against the repressive state machine. It focuses on Ilʹia, Lena’s husband, his suspended life and fight for Lena, and his, in fact, futile attempts to find justice for her in a situation in which the law is ceasing to work. Under threat himself, he hides in the countryside; on returning home, he finds that it has been searched and wrecked.

We witness his meetings with a lawyer who eventually refuses to continue the case when Lena’s situation worsens. Lena’s detention is continually extended, from a week to two months, then to a two-year sentence, and eventually she is threatened with up to fifteen years of imprisonment on charges of high treason. Ilʹia is detained and released, but remains under constant surveillance and threat. As the situation develops, the initial sense of helplessness gives way to Ilʹia’s growing anger that pushes him to speak out about the ongoing injustice. The police urge him to convince Lena to write a clemency request to avoid years in prison. He tries, as he understands that this is the only possibility to escape. Lena also tries but finds herself unable to meet this ‘request’. Next, we see Lena in court, listening to her final sentencing – eight years in prison. Besides this scene and the opening sequence, we see Lena twice, during Ilʹia’s prison visits. The rest of her appearances occur in Ilʹia’s flashbacks.

Under the Grey Sky grounds its plot in actual facts, and Lena and Ilʹia’s relationship in the script was developed with the background of the director’s conversations with Ihar, Katsiaryna’s husband. However, the film cannot be reduced to a mere reconstruction of the actual events. Tamkovich insists that the film should not be taken as a real portrait of the actual people. Her vision of the story is fictional; it is her reflection on this drama, one of many, and is, moreover, a reflection on the situation in Belarus and the audience response to it. This film, Tamkovich says, was for her a way to deal with traumatic experience and the feeling of being defeated; having experienced “a tremendous helplessness,” [she felt] “as if something got cracked in our reality, a feeling of helplessness and uselessness appeared, understanding of what can be done disappeared” (Zamirovskaya 2024).⁴ As Tatsiana Zamirovskaya suggests, by making this film, Tamkovich “wanted to reclaim her agency” (“вернуть себе агентность”) and, citing the film director, “This was a difficult and painful process, but it was easier than the feeling that you were deprived of the possibility to act, deprived of your voice, that you are gasping for air and don’t understand how to live with this” (Zamirovskaya 2024).⁵ This emotional state is familiar to many Belarusians, both to those still in Belarus and those who had to flee the country.

The film was shot in Warsaw and its surroundings in the month of April, although the actual events occurred in late autumn and early summer. Many scenes, not only in prison, were filmed in a former juvenile hall near Warsaw (Tamkovich 2024). In addition, the film uses documentary footage: the broadcast at the beginning of the film, the montage of Katsiaryna’s streaming from anti-government protests in Minsk in August and autumn 2020 at the end of the film, and the court footage that ends the film. Some scenes in the film are, in fact, re-enactments: the waiting at the prison’s gate and the reading of the verdict; silent waiting in apartments with terrifying noises of the riot police outside; police on the streets and at the doors – these scenes are grounded in images of actual events which had been widely documented by journalists and private persons, and are now part of an enormous visual archive and collective memory of Belarusians.

The film’s plot intertwines the present with scenes from the past that emerge as Ilʹia’s memories in moments of his solitude. These flashbacks take us back to Lena and Ilʹia’s life before the life-changing stream, to their conversations and fears, to their deliberation on the necessity to leave the country because of increasing impossibility and danger to work when all independent voices are getting suppressed. The song “I Was Born Here” (Ia naradziŭsia tut), from the eponymous Belarusian album recorded in 2000, brings a brief moment of relief for Ilʹia halfway through the film, as he and his friend listen to it, after a shot of cognac in a kitchen. The song insists on staying even if it seems so tempting to leave. This song is a confession of love to the country under the grey sky – the words from the song that give the film its title and, perhaps, contribute to the film’s aesthetics with its grey palette, much like the grey sky of late autumn. We hear this song again during the end credits. The song brings an extended temporality to the film and to the persistent narrative of leaving versus staying in the country under the grey sky, which is not, it seems, the best place to live, as both the song and Lena’s case suggest. The hope resides there too, for grey is not the absence of colour; it is a colour full of potentiality, and thus hope. This film is about hope, Mara Tamkovich repeatedly states.

Minimalism and silence, like greyness, are salient elements of the film’s aesthetics. The chaotic movement of the hand-held camera in the film’s opening sequence and later, at the prison’s gate and in the court, gives way to a slow and deliberate pace when we are with Ilʹia in his solitude or with him and Lena during the prison visits. Some reviews highlight the absence of sensationalisation in the film. And indeed, it is absent. The story develops through subtle and careful exploration of the protagonists’ feelings and emotions – in a gentle way, maintaining a compassionate distance, the one that enables the audience to live through the pain of the other. The static camera, restricted framing, distance in proximity, and persistent pauses in action and speech function as an important ethical device: they allow the viewers to be there, with the protagonist(s), but not in an intrusive way; in proximity but not too close. They create space and time for the protagonists to breathe, to think, to try to understand, to make a decision, even if the latter seems impossible. We are put in a position of a compassionate companion (observer), silent, slightly distant, but there, being invited to share Ilʹia and Lena’s difficult and painful path. Tamkovich suggests that Under the Grey Sky is also about love, not romantic love, but love understood as an ability to understand, without judgment, and accept the choice of the other, even if it seems impossible to do so. While the moments of the camera’s chaotic movement show images so painfully recognisable to many Belarusians, the quieter, more tense part of the film puts us, together with the characters, into a reflective and enduring mode.

Silence dominates the film’s sonorous environment. Conversations that punctuate this silence and silent moments of the realisation of the futility of any action, and attempts to understand and to come to terms with what is happening, together with small gestures, looks, and small details, only make this silence louder. We spend a lot of time with Ilʹia, in his silent company – these moments bring up the past. The communication between Lena and Ilʹia happens mostly through an exchange of looks – long, cautious, inquiring and demanding, those that speak louder than words. Sound, its economical but determinative use, plays a big part too. In silence, we can hear better, and with a heightened awareness, every sound seems louder and more important, and so do screams from the Akrestsina prison, as well as the sounds of the Russian war against Ukraine in Lena’s prison.⁶ They create a space beyond the visible, envelop the film’s economical narration and put this private situation in a wider context which remains outside the frame but is made present.

In a short monologue after the court hearing, which sentences Lena and Ola to two years in prison, Ilʹia speaks to the camera about the regime’s revenge, reprisal, and fear of its own people, whom it takes as hostages. With that, the film summarises the terrible situation in present-day Belarus. But there is also, as the film reminds us, resistance – silent (quiet or silenced), exiled (geographically or inwardly), resistance in solidarity and love that brings hope when the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness seem so overwhelming.

While maintaining an important focus on individual experience of survival (how to make sense of the ongoing uncertainty and insecurity for prolonged weeks, months, and in many cases still ongoing years of living under a constant threat coming from one’s own country), Under the Grey Sky speaks to the Belarusian audience as part of its collective memory of the events of 2020 and their aftermath. For the insider, this film cannot be seen outside the heavy, persistent, and still ongoing madness that has unfolded in its multiplicity of repressive practices in Belarus. For an outsider – the international audience – the film makes this local experience feel universal and recognisable to many. As Sara Clements ends her review, “Under the Grey Sky paints a chilling portrait of political repression, with familiar scenes of protest and police violence that are currently happening in cities across the world. We have seen the lengths law enforcement will go to hide the truth, but we also see the lengths that journalists will go to tell it. It’s a film set in a specific time and place, but it’s universal as a call for the importance and necessity of this kind of reporting – no matter the risks” (Clements 2024).

Post-Scriptum: Darya Chultsova was released in 2022 after serving her full two-year prison sentence. Katsiaryna Andreyeva was released in March 2026 with a group of other political prisoners after the Belarusian regime’s negotiations with the US in exchange for lifting Potash sanctions. She spent five years and four months in prison. Like many political prisoners released with her or earlier, Katsiaryna was transported by force out of the country. Ihar Ilyash, Katsiaryna’s husband, is now in prison along with close to a thousand other political prisoners. After several previous arrests, he was detained again in October 2024 and, in September 2025, sentenced to four years for “Promoting extremist activities” and “Discrediting Belarus”. The first words Katsiaryna spoke on camera after her release were to fight for Ihar’s release.

I.Kh.

Bio

The author’s identity is withheld for their safety.

Bibliography

BYPOL. 2021. “BYPOL Named Those Involved in the Death of Raman Bandarenka.” Voice of Belarus. February 26. https://www.voiceofbelarus.com/preliminary-investigation-into-the-death-of-bandarenka/.

Clements, Sara. 2024. “Tribeca: Under the Grey Sky Is an Unsettling Look at the Silencing of Journalists.” Pajiba. June 2. https://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/under-the-grey-sky-is-an-unsettling-look-at-the-silencing-of-journalists.php.

RFE/RL. 2021. “Belarus Suspends Probe into Killing of Anti-Government Protester.” RFE/RL. September 17. https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-raman-bandarenka-death/31465396.html.

Tamkovich, Mara. 2024. “Mara Tamkovich o festivale Tribeca, tvorcheskikh ogranicheniiakh i kollektivnoi pamiati belorusov” [Mara Tamkovich on the Tribeca Festival, Creative Constraints, and the Collective Memory of Belarusians]. Interview with Deutsche Welle Belarus. June 9. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogOFmix3NfE.

Zamirovskaya, Tatsiana. 2024. “Mara Tamkovich: ‘Tolʹko kogda ia sama posmotrela svoi film, ia poniala, chto on pro nadezhdu’” [Mara Tamkovich: ‘Only When I Watched My Own Film Did I Understand That It Is About Hope’]. Golos Ameriki [Voice of America]. June 11. https://www.golosameriki.com/a/under-the-grey-sky/7651855.html.

Filmography

Tamkovich, Mara. 2022. [U zhyvym ėfiry] / Na żywo / Live. Wajda Film School, Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF), Belsat TV.

Tamkovich, Mara. 2024. [Pad shėrym nebam] / Pod szarym niebem / Under the Grey Sky. Media Corporation.

Suggested Citation

Kh, I. 2026. Film review: “Under the Grey Sky (2024) by Mara Tamkovich”. 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.2026.00022.426.

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

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