Belarusian Cinema after 2020

Editorial Introduction

Author

Sasha Razor and Volha Isakava

Abstract

Since the falsified presidential election of 9 August 2020 and the violent suppression of the protests it triggered, Belarusian independent cinema has had to remake itself in exile. Already marginal at home, where it worked outside a state industry monopolised by Belarusfilm, it now pieces together, dispersed and underfunded, something that gradually approximates a working industry. Scattered across Europe and the United States, filmmakers, critics, and festival organisers are taking up, function by function, the apparatus by which a national cinema is made and given value: production, distribution, and exhibition on one side; accreditation, canon formation, and critical evaluation on the other. They do so without regular budgets, without institutions to fall back on, and often at real risk to themselves. This work has coalesced, for now, around five bodies: the Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network (BFN), the Belarusian Independent Film Academy (BIFA), the distribution platform VODBLISK, the Northern Lights Film Festival, and the Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award. Together they constitute what we call networked diasporic governance: a cultural infrastructure held across borders by a handful of practitioners, in place of, and against, the state’s institutions. The interviews, essays, and reviews gathered in this issue document its formation from within. Whether this configuration can survive, and whether it can scale, is now the question this issue poses.

Keywords

Belarusian cinema; 2020 Belarusian protests; diasporic governance; exile cinema; accented cinema; stateless cinema; Belarusian Independent Film Academy (BIFA); Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network (BFN); Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award; VODBLISK; protest documentary; face blur; decolonising Slavic Studies.

Editorial Notes for the Special Issue

Editorial Notes across all texts in the issue are rendered in footnotes with EN indicator.

Note on Transliteration

In all texts published in this issue, we follow the ALA-LC (Library of Congress) romanisation tables, in accordance with Apparatus house style, retaining diacritics but omitting ligatures; the Cyrillic soft sign is rendered with a prime. Belarusian names and titles are romanised from their Belarusian-language forms, a choice consistent with the decolonising aims of this issue, and appear in ALA-LC romanisation at first mention. Where a person has an internationally recognised or preferred spelling, that version serves as the primary form throughout, with the ALA-LC form in parentheses, or in square brackets within parentheses, at first mention, for example: Svetlana Alexievich (Sviatlana Aleksievich); where the two forms coincide no second form is given. We define an internationally recognised spelling as the one that consistently appears in English-language sources, particularly on professional websites, a criterion chosen to lend visibility to Belarusian film professionals and to enable cross-referencing. Authors and interview participants appear under their preferred spellings as their primary form. Russian-language names and sources are romanised from Russian by the same system; bibliographic entries follow the language of the source.

Note on Belarusian Translation of Film Titles

In all texts published in this issue, films belonging to the corpus of Belarusian cinema but not released under a Belarusian title are given a Belarusian translation of the title in [square brackets] as an editorial reconstruction rather than a title of record. This issue understands Belarusian cinema broadly: films produced in Belarus, in both independent and state-sponsored formats; films made by Belarusian filmmakers elsewhere, including in exile; films identified as Belarusian by consensus in Belarusian filmmaking community (such as at festivals, in film criticism and media); and films that draw substantially on Belarusian cultural heritage, notably adaptations of Belarusian literature, including from the Soviet period. All films are cited under their title of record, the title of original release, following the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) Moving Image Cataloguing Manual. Because the multilingual, exilic, and colonial conditions of Belarusian film history have left many films of this corpus without a Belarusian title of record, such films receive an editorially reconstructed Belarusian title. This title is based on established usage in Belarusian-language media (where possible), given in [square brackets] at first mention, followed by the title of record and the English translation. For example: [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent. Subsequent mentions use the English translation. No reconstruction is supplied for films whose title of record is already Belarusian, for proper-noun titles like Mara, for titles circulating untranslated in Belarusian-language media such as A Kid’s Flick, or for Russian-language films made in Russia.

Introduction

On 17 February 2023, in a packed room at the Martin-Gropius-Bau during the Berlinale, a group of Belarusian filmmakers founded a national film academy outside the nation it represents. The conveners were Volia Chajkouskaya (Volia Chaĭkoŭskaia), directors Darya Zhuk (Dar’ia Zhuk), Aliaksei Paluyan (Aliakseĭ Paluian), and Andrei Kutsila (Andrėĭ Kutsila), the festival expert Igor Soukmanov (Ihar Sukmanaŭ), and the film critic Irena Kaciałovič (Irėna Katsialovich). Germany’s Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth, spoke. So did the heads of the Berlinale and the European Film Academy, who announced from the stage that the new body would be the first new member of the EFA’s emerging Association of European Film Academies.¹ The Belarusian Independent Film Academy is registered in Estonia, by necessity rather than design. An institution that nominates a country’s films for international awards and certifies their national status had just been constituted with the recognition of Berlin and Tallinn, but none from Minsk. The people in the room were filmmakers and critics in exile. They had come from the European cities they relocated to after 2020, and the academy they were founding had to be built abroad because they themselves could not return to Belarus.

Almost two years later, the Belarusian state celebrated the centenary of Belarusian cinema.² The anniversary commemorated a top-down founding from a commanding metropole to the periphery: Belgoskino, the Belarusian State Cinema Trust, was established by Soviet decree in Leningrad in December 1924, with its production base in Leningrad, and not relocated to Minsk for fifteen years. The Listapad festival, the only international film festival in Belarus, marked the date by opening with a National Archives exhibition that traced the studio’s lineage. By 2024, however, the tradition being commemorated had been hollowed out. Much of its talent worked abroad. Most of its independent critics wrote from exile. The Listapad festival itself had been purged of independent voices, handed to the state studio Belarusfilm, and stripped of its international accreditation. The right to speak for Belarusian cinema had passed, decisively and without ceremony, to the European capitals where most independent Belarusian filmmaking now happens.

These two scenes mark a transfer of authority. The decisive break happened after the fraudulent August 2020 re-election of Belarus’s long-ruling autocrat triggered an uprising.³ Unprecedented mass protests, carried by ordinary people from across the social spectrum, were met with escalating state repression. Mass incarceration and mass exile followed, sweeping up ordinary protesters, activists, journalists, and cultural workers, filmmakers among them.⁴ The rupture of 2020 was acute, but its geography was not new: displacement and diaspora have shaped Belarusian culture for over a century, and the uprising of 2020 transformed a long-standing condition rather than producing one from nothing. How, after 2020, Belarusian cinema has reinvented itself within that longer history is the subject of this volume.

The special issue appears in two volumes. The first, in front of you, addresses Belarusian cinema in the wake of the 2020 uprising. The filmmakers, festival organisers, and critics named above are all featured in this volume. The second volume, forthcoming in 2026/2027, focuses on Belarusian film history from the Soviet period to independent cinema before 2020. The volume joins a growing body of scholarship on contemporary Belarus and the 2020 uprising,⁵ though it is, in Belarusian film studies, the first English-language thematic issue dedicated specifically to the field.

The issue is also part of the larger project of integrating Belarusian cinema studies into the decolonisation efforts within Eurasian and Slavic Studies in the Western academy. The 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has made the critical examination of imperial bias in how the East Slavic region is researched and taught an urgent task. Vitaly Chernetsky has framed this through the concept of “epistemic injustice”: the long-standing exclusion of Ukrainian voices from the production of knowledge about the region, concurrent with the material violence of the war itself (Chernetsky 2025). Simply put, epistemic injustice and oppression, used extensively in decolonial studies, critical race and feminist studies, denote ways in which knowledge production and circulation exclude and marginalise non-hegemonic voices, thereby designating some forms of knowledge as more valuable than others. In an essay on “unlearning Russocentrism”, as a “knowledge regime”, Belarusian feminist scholar Tatsiana Shchurko also calls for decolonial re-configuration of our field through relational epistemologies, found in feminist and indigenous studies, that would allow diversity of voices and knowledge production sites, or “a constellation of interconnected histories”, to form for non-Russian cultures and communities of the region, including Belarus (Shchurko 2026).

It was in part from Belarusian soil that Russia staged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The fact belongs at the head of this issue, before anything else can be said. The regime that lent its territory to the war had survived only eighteen months earlier by crushing a national uprising with the Kremlin’s backing: its complicity in the invasion and its colonial dependence on Moscow are one fact, not two. The country’s territory and resources were offered up; the people who had just risen against the regime were never asked. The film institutions this issue examines emerged from that dispossession. Organisations founded in exile, such as BIFA and the Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award, define themselves in their charter documents against the Belarusian state and in solidarity with Ukraine.⁶ That solidarity has a history: the 2014 Revolution of Dignity was an explicit reference point for Belarusian protesters in 2020, and Belarusians of the Kalinoŭski Regiment fight today on Ukrainian fronts. But the two positions are not symmetrical. New Belarus was formed through repression and forced migration; Ukraine pays for its sovereignty in destroyed cities and poisoned land – and in lives that will not be lived. Naming that asymmetry is the price of entry into what Chernetsky (2025) calls the “coalition essential for liberation”.

For scholars of Belarusian cinema, upholding that coalition is decolonising work: standing with Ukraine while dismantling the imperial optics that have long subordinated both countries to Russia and rendered them invisible, not least in the cultural sphere. This special issue takes the one step a journal of film scholarship is equipped to take: centring Belarusian cinema as a subject in its own right. Three further principles have guided our work as editors.

Against hierarchy of knowledge. We want the readers of Apparatus to encounter scholarship from Belarus by Belarusians; both volumes accordingly include translated reprints of scholars and critics whose work has shaped the field alongside scholars outside Belarus. Scholarship produced in Belarusian or Russian is often excluded from wider academic circulation, not solely because of the language barrier but because it does not conform to Western-centric metrics of what counts as ‘proper’ scholarly knowledge – journal indexes, institutional affiliations, peer-review practices and the like.

Against extractivism. Both volumes feature interviews with practitioners at the centre of Belarusian cinema, whose work propels it forward. This is particularly true of our first issue, on cinema in exile, dedicated to ongoing changes, including displacement of many filmmakers. It was important for us to elevate filmmakers’ and critics’ voices on their own terms and in their own words, rather than treating them as ‘native informants’ whose experiences and competencies are to be extracted and reframed by Western academics.

Against invisibility. As North American scholars working on Belarusian cinema, the most common reaction we encounter when presenting our work is surprise that there is anything to encounter at all. Belarus is routinely framed in public discourse as a “failed nation” or “the last dictatorship in Europe” – a country defined by what it lacks.⁷ In cinema studies, this framing performs a double erasure: it disenfranchises the historical canon and dismisses the contemporary work. The need is sharpest in the Soviet field, where the scholarly corpus has long tilted toward Russian cinema as the core of Soviet cinema as such. Belarusian films are read as less interesting precisely because they are less known in the Russo-centric canon – a catch-22 that turns epistemic erasure into a verdict on the quality of cinema itself. The categories that make Belarusian cinema invisible are not neutral. They operate at three levels: the global hierarchy that elevates Hollywood above nearly everything else, the persistent privileging of large-country cinemas over small ones, and – within the post-Soviet field specifically – a Russo-centric canon that has yet to be decolonised.

Western academic hierarchies notwithstanding, the primary threat to Belarusian cultural life is the malicious destruction set forth by the Belarusian state. The Minsk regime itself is engaged in active material erasure: web platforms taken down, cultural venues closed, archives made inaccessible, the people who maintain them driven into exile or prosecuted.⁸ Preservation, documentation, and archive-building of the country’s unofficial culture and the history of the protests are accordingly at the centre of Belarusian cinema after 2020.

A word on our own positionality. We write as Belarusian diasporic film scholars – one Belarusian American, the other Belarusian Canadian, both currently based in the United States – working from inside the diasporic conditions this issue describes and the Anglophone scholarly apparatus it addresses. State-sanctioned cinema continues to be produced inside Belarus, and the picture there is more complicated than the binary of regime and emigration suggests – some filmmakers and industry professionals have stayed – but any independent practices that continue inside the country are largely obscure to us on the outside. As Max Zhbankou (Maksim Zhbankoŭ) observes in this volume, those who remain are in deep “partisan” mode, a term whose force in Belarusian comes from the Second World War insurgents who fought against the Nazi occupation. Some crucial voices are accordingly absent from this volume: the expert community is small enough that several contributors felt their work would be identifiable even under anonymity, and one significant film review we had hoped to include was withheld at its director’s explicit request. These absences are themselves part of what the issue documents. For the reasons articulated above, this special issue concerns the independent and historical Soviet Belarusian cinema only, and not the state production of the present.

Our central thesis is that since August 2020 the apparatus of Belarusian cinema has been rebuilt, unevenly and under duress, outside the country whose name it carries and against the state that governs it. Filmmakers, critics, and organisers dispersed across Europe and the United States have reassembled it function by function: production, distribution, and exhibition on one side, accreditation, canon formation, and critical evaluation on the other. The state in Minsk retains the historical institutions, the studio, and the legal continuity of the name; what has passed beyond its reach is the centre of gravity, which now lies with the work being done abroad.

The Belarusian case belongs to a broader conversation, but it enters that conversation on a particular footing. Since Higson, a national cinema has been understood as constituted less by where its films are made than by how they are circulated, exhibited, reviewed, taught, and claimed (Higson 1989, 36–47), so a dispersed, deterritorialised body of work can still be a national cinema once the apparatus that consecrates it as one has been rebuilt – which is our claim. The available theoretical frames for cases like Belarus bear similarities without quite containing it. The exilic and the “accented” (Naficy 2001) take the displaced filmmaker and an aesthetic of displacement as their unit, whereas our subject is also the institution. The theorisation of stateless cinemas, Palestinian (Dabashi 2006) and Kurdish (Koçer 2014, 473–88), supplies the warrant to treat a cinema deprived of its state as a cinema nonetheless, along with Koçer’s point that such naming helps bring a cinema into being rather than describing it after the fact. Yet Belarus is not stateless in their sense. Those cinemas were built where no national apparatus had existed; Belarusian cinema inherited one from the Soviet studio system – fully nationalised, state-funded, internationally accredited, never evenly available to its independent filmmakers but real – and after 2020 it was taken from them. Its closest structural precedent is the Chilean cinema of the Pinochet years, whose exiles founded an institution to hold the work and named it cine en el exilio (Pick 1988; Mouesca 1988); Belarusian cinema took that path and went further, reconstituting a whole apparatus, because the festival circuit and digital distribution that earlier exiles lacked were there to carry it.

The conditions under which this formation operates are interstitial in the sense Naficy gives the term, marked by “trauma, rupture and coercion” (Naficy 2001, 14), and the contributors to this issue describe them at length. Max Zhbankou’s essay “Life in the Ruins” captures the zeitgeist of displacement and calls for building anew: “We are not gathering the pieces of yesterday. We are making a country for tomorrow.” (Zhbankou, this volume). The founders of the Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award describe the struggle for visibility and the perennial financial instability of exile, and the risks to the safety of those still based in Belarus (Red Heather interview, this volume). Taras Tarnalitsky echoes these conditions in his essay on film criticism in exile, sketching a challenging environment for critics (Tarnalitsky, this volume). Volia Chajkouskaya, founder of the VODBLISK platform and the Northern Lights Film Festival, addresses financial strain and a viewership divided by borders (Chajkouskaya interview, this volume). The institutional density described here rests on a labour base far thinner than its institutional count suggests – a few practitioners, often the same ones, holding several functions at once. This labour is also gendered: like the 2020 uprising it succeeded, post-2020 cinema is built and sustained, by and large, by women, a fact that should inflect any reading of the institutional histories below. Volia Chajkouskaya is a co-founder of BIFA (Belarusian Independent Film Academy), VODBLISK and Northern Lights, being the chief administrator of the last two projects. Irena Kaciałovič is a co-founder of BIFA and the Red Heather Award. The revolution, in Olga Shparaga’s phrase, has a female face. So does the cinema it set in motion.

Cinema Before 2020

Before 2020, Belarusian cinema lived under a precarious tacit arrangement. Independent filmmakers could sometimes screen domestically and receive limited state support, on the unwritten condition that they avoid openly political subjects. Censorship was selective and deniable, calibrated to avoid potential international embarrassments a more direct intervention would produce. In an interview in this volume Andrei Kutsila discusses the censoring of his documentary Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War (2019) that resulted in a rebuke from FIPRESCI (Kutsila interview, this volume). The compromise was workable because Belarusian cinema’s centre of gravity was inside the country, and because practitioners working outside it – in Poland, Germany, Russia, the Baltic countries – formed a periphery – not yet a critical alternative. The contributors to this issue register that periphery’s longer history. Aliaksei Paluyan, who went to Germany for his film education in 2012, describes in his interview here the strangeness of finding himself a decade later conscripted into the post-2020 vocabulary of exile: “Germany has already become my second home” (Paluyan interview, this volume). Vladimir Kozlov (Uladzimir Kazloŭ), a founder of the Microbudget Film Incubator at the Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network (BFN), moved from Belarus to Moscow in 2000 and, in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, left Russia in 2022 – first for Istanbul and, about a year later, for Germany (Kozlov interview, this volume). Andrei Kutsila, Belarusian-trained director, had worked for the Poland-based Belsat TV long before he was forced into exile (Kutsila interview, this volume). Polish-born Janusz Gawryluk, documentary filmmaker and founder of Bulbamovie festival, has worked in Belarusian cinema from Poland his entire professional life (Gawryluk interview, part 2 of this special issue). What 2020 changed was not the existence of these practitioners but their representation in the field.

The mechanics of the long compromise are sketched here by Andrei Kureichik (Andrėĭ Kurėĭchyk), whose essay traces the apparatus of selective censorship through the 2010s. The arrangement produced a particular kind of cinema: ambitious in its formal experimentation, oblique in its political address, capable of intermittent international visibility but rarely of sustained domestic distribution (Kureichik, this volume). What the 2020 events destroyed was an incipient opening in which the state sector had begun to underwrite the cultural work the long compromise had asked the independent sector to avoid. To say the cinema lost its centre of gravity in 2020 is to understate the extent of the loss. It lost a centre of gravity that had, for the first time in three decades, begun to move in a direction its independent filmmakers had long wanted.

The film Kupala (2020), directed by Vladimir Yankovskiy (Uladzimir Iankoŭski) featured prominently in the essay by Kureichik and reviewed in this issue by David Kurkovskiy, illustrates the second loss in concrete form. A Belarusfilm production with a prestige-project budget, Kupala is a biopic of the country’s preeminent national poet Yanka Kupala, completed on the state dime and, then, effectively shelved. After August 2020, the canonical national subject could not be reconciled with the regime’s growing repressive apparatus and deepening alignment with the Russian Federation that both sustain autocracy in Minsk. The film’s non-release became its most politically legible statement. The Belarusian state would not release its own biopic of its own poet, on its own studio’s budget, in its own national language. The shelving marks the point at which its claim to administer a Belarusian national cinema began to lose coherence on its own terms.

The compromise unravelled twice over in eighteen months: the independent sector undone by liquidation, the state sector by ideological recapture. By the end of 2021, both halves were gone, and the centre of gravity of Belarusian cinema had completed its passage from inside the country to outside of it. Festival recognition arrived almost at the same moment as the displacement that produced it. [Smelastsʹ]/ Courage (Aliaksei Paluyan, 2021, Germany), reviewed in this volume by Oliver Okun, was premiered in the Berlinale Special programme, the first film about the uprising to reach the festival; [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ]/ Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent (Andrei Kutsila, 2021, Poland), reviewed in this volume by Sasha Razor, won Best Documentary at the Warsaw Film Festival that autumn; [Metadychka] / Handbuch / Handbook (Pavel Mozhar, 2021, Germany/Belarus) took IDFA’s Best Short Documentary in November 2021. International festival circulation became the primary exhibition route for Belarusian cinema in the same year that the domestic route closed for good.

Cinema and the Witnessing of the 2020 Uprising

The rupture came in August 2020, when the announced election results sent protesters into the streets en masse. Belarusian filmmakers were in the thick of it. On the night of 9–10 August, officers of the riot police (AMAP in Belarusian, better known by its Russian acronym OMON) beat and detained director Maksim Shved while he was shooting material that would become [Belarus: marshrut perabudavany] / Belarus: marshrut perestroen / Belarus: Recalculating Route (Maksim Shved, 2020, Poland), reviewed in this volume by Katya Lopatko. Sasha Kulak shot what would become a hybrid documentary Mara (2022, France/UK), reviewed by Rita Safariants, featuring street footage and testimonies of assaulted protesters. Paluyan judged that his footage of Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) members could not be safely preserved inside the country; he carried it out and finished Courage in Germany. Before fleeing Belarus, Kureichik hid his feature film Liberté (2026, USA/Belarus) with his team’s driver, knowing his home would be searched. By the end of 2020, the independent political films about Belarus could no longer be made in Belarus.

The uprising produced a documentary record that was, from the outset, a public archive without precedent in the country’s history. The protests were filmed by tens of thousands of phones and circulated through Telegram channels whose subscriber counts crossed into the millions, exceeding the readership of any Belarusian outlet ever published (Rudnik and Rönnblom 2025). The documentary corpus that emerged afterwards, numbering several dozen films, stands against this vast protest archive: footage shot by ordinary citizens on their phones, unstable digital material scattered across the internet and liable to disappear whenever circulation became unsafe, much of it without clear attribution or authorship. The films discussed in this issue should be read against this backdrop: filming under dangerous conditions, collective and uncertain authorship, state digital surveillance, and the instability of digital media.

Nothing registers this new reality more visibly than the now-ubiquitous facial blurring prominent in post-2020 Belarusian documentary cinema that highlights the dangers of making films about the uprising specifically, or dissident cinema in general. Tarnalitsky recounts the case that set the pattern. After the 2023 YouTube premiere of [Khronika suchasnastsi] / Khronika nastoiashchego / Chronicle of the Present (Mikalai Maminau [Mikalai Maminaŭ], 2023, Lithuania), assembled from the director’s own phone footage, Belarusian authorities claimed to have identified protesters in that film through facial recognition (the film is currently available on YouTube with facial blurring).⁹ Whether or not the claim was accurate, it reset the terms of how documentary cinema approaches its subject: concealing protesters’ faces or faces of those who speak against the regime on screen became common practice. The blur epitomises the risks to personal safety and dignity when encountering the Belarusian state repressive apparatus. It also serves as a visual reminder of the force of resistance and protest power in Belarus and as a witness to the split in the country that is now shaped by civic life in exile. Chajkouskaya, drawing on her film [Ne stvoranyia dlia palityki] / Not Made for Politics (2025, Estonia/France) in her interview here, describes the blur as a constraint that slows production and hinders the filmmaker’s vision. Yet to blur a face is not only to hide it. In a country whose autocratic power rests on the systematic erasure of history, to film events – even with faces blurred – is to write history which otherwise will remain unwritten.

If the blurred face is where the post-2020 documentary refuses visibility, the footage behind it sits on ground the filmmaker does not control. Most of the uprising was shot on phones and uploaded to Telegram, above all to NEXTA, a channel run from Warsaw that took in as many as 10,000 anonymous messages an hour and rebroadcast them to millions (Edwards 2020; Hurska 2020). Telegram’s forwarding stripped each clip of its origin, and the same feed was disposable: channels were declared extremist and blocked, phones were seized at checkpoints, and a video survived only if someone had saved a copy before it was purged. This is the condition Wendy Chun calls the enduring ephemeral, in which a digital record persists only as long as it is actively copied and disappears once that stops (Chun 2008). What reached the editing room was also a poor image in Hito Steyerl’s sense, vertical and re-compressed with every repost, its low resolution the visible trace of how far it had travelled (Steyerl 2009). The documentaries answer this by taking the footage off the platform and fixing it in a form that can outlast deletion. [My ne vedali adno adnaho da hėtaha leta] / My ne znali drug druga do etogo leta / We Didn’t Know Each Other Until This Summer (Olga Abramchik [Volha Abramchyk], 2021, Belarus/USA) is cut entirely from these submitted clips, with no voiceover and no credited camera, so that Abramchik edits rather than shoots and the film becomes the stable copy the feed could not keep. Mara sets one unedited audio phone recording of an arrest inside an otherwise stylised film, letting the raw clip break its surface. Belarus: Recalculating Route is built from footage shot the night police beat and detained its director, the recording’s risk standing in for production value. In each case, the film does the work of moving a vanishing record onto festival screens and diaspora archives, where it can finally be kept.

What the record captured was not only events but a political form. The uprising left behind an archive of people’s power, the first of its kind in the country’s history: videos, photos, writings, posters, leaflets, zines, newsletters, drawings from prisons, and countless other testimonies by ordinary people to the history unfolding around them. The protests embodied the horizontal solidarity that Olga Shparaga (Volʹha Shparaha), following Judith Butler, theorises in U revoliutsii zhenskoe litso / The Revolution Has a Female Face (2022): the mutual dependency and care that bind a horizontally connected society. That solidarity was evident in the mass mobilisation of people from all walks of life, the proliferation of grassroots self-governing projects, and the diversity of actors involved, from labour unions to feminist collectives and LGBTQIA+ organisations; evident too in the artivism of cultural workers, from the walkouts at the National Kupala Theatre, to impromptu music performances, to the conceptual actions of artists such as Ales Pushkin (Alesʹ Pushkin), who died in custody in 2023. Alongside came an archive of protest art, a gallery of visual symbols, and a repertoire of songs. The coordination held: day after day, week after week, even as the regime chose entrenchment and brutal repression, people came out, and a parallel effort surged to support the detained and imprisoned, including the networks that eventually helped Belarusians escape the country. This solidarity was not accidental; it was prepared by decades of sustained political activism and a thriving cultural scene.

The uprising also made visible a grammar of solidarity and self-organisation that did not route through the centre. The concept, introduced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in On Justification (2006) as three ‘grammars of commonality’, names the generative foundation that supplies the rules of engagement for individual actors in collective action for the common good. The derived term ‘grammar of protests’ circulates in both activist discourse and the study of social movements, with particular prominence in research on networked movements: from Occupy Wall Street, the Tunisian Revolution, and the Maidan Revolution of Dignity, to Black Lives Matter and the recent Gen Z protests from Nepal to Madagascar.¹⁰ These movements prize a decentred, leaderless logic of self-organisation, empowered by digital tools – from social networks to viral symbols drawn from popular culture – and are often identified with younger generations protesting corruption, precarity, economic hardship, and the curtailment of rights. The Belarusian uprising fits these categories well. We use ‘grammar of protests’, accordingly, to emphasise the generative logic of the uprising rather than its inventory of forms: the shared, implicit rules by which dispersed participants produced coordinated action with no centre authorising each instance, as a finite grammar yields unbounded well-formed utterances. We prefer it to the more established ‘repertoire of contention’ (Tilly 2006), which names a finite, inherited stock of known performances and treats innovation beyond it as exceptional.

In the Belarus of 2020, decisions, mutual defence, and aesthetic production happened simultaneously across courtyards, workplaces, and stages, with no node licensed to speak for the rest. As the poet Dmitry Strotsev (Dzmitryĭ Strotsaŭ) observed in December 2020, the regime’s refusal of vertical representation through fair elections gave ‘a colossal impulse to the spontaneous becoming of horizontal direct democracy right in the courtyards, entryways, and stairwell landings of Belarus’ (Strotsev 2020, quoted in Shparaga 2022, 180). The same essay named the self-organising neighbourhoods ‘courtyard republics’ (Strotsev 2020, quoted in Shparaga 2022, 179): not a protest tactic but a polity in miniature. The phrase outlived the marches because the polity it named did, surviving the closure of the streets and the dispersal across borders. Horizontal coordination – the grammar of protests – became for Belarusians, the filmmakers among them, a portable political form.

Cinema in the Post-2020 Exile

It is common to think of the Belarusian protest movement as failing to reach its immediate political goals. However, as the experience of Belarusian diasporic networks of governance suggests, the structures of self-determination and self-organisation articulated during the protests represent a more enduring political legacy.¹¹ They provide the foundations for both a new democratic Belarus and for rebuilding in exile: the rebuilding that is crucial for displaced individuals and communities, and for the survival of independent Belarusian cultural institutions. The horizontal grammar of the protests, channelled through the same digital architecture that had carried them, supplied the orientation for organising Belarusian cinema abroad. The political form of the protests – distributed, refusing centralised representation – became the disposition of the institutions that followed. In Belarusian cinema after 2020, the grammar of political mobilisation and the grammar of industrial reconstitution draw on the same source.

In the years that followed the uprising, an institutional ecology took up, function by function, the operations of a national film industry that its practitioners no longer recognised as theirs. Its earliest collective articulation arrived on 1 March 2022, days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine crossed the border from Belarusian territory: more than 130 Belarusian filmmakers signed an antiwar statement (Belarusian Film Community 2022; see also Goodfellow 2022).

The Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network, founded in 2022 by Leonid Kalitenya (Leanid Kalitsenia), Max Zhbankou, and Vladimir Kozlov, set the structural template. The Network refuses hierarchy on principle. It operates as a hub, directory, and forum for filmmakers dispersed across Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and beyond, with no claim to speak for the field. Its first BarCamp in Warsaw, an ‘anti-conference’ at which participants set the agenda on the spot, drew over 70 practitioners from a dozen countries. In October 2023, the Microbudget Film Incubator was launched, with the goal of supporting five Belarusian filmmakers making their first feature films. The impetus was that Belarusian cinema could no longer afford to wait for established film production entities (Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network 2023; Kozlov interview, this volume). Zhbankou’s essay in this issue serves as the conceptual underpinning for the microbudget ethos, appropriately written in punk style and titled “The Music of the Rasps” (Zhbankou, this volume). The microbudget model received its industrial vindication in 2025, when [Lebiadzinaia pesnia Fiodara Ozerava] / The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov (Yuri Semashko [Iuryĭ Siamashka], 2025, Lithuania/Germany), the inaugural incubator project, premiered in the Berlinale Forum, where it won the Tagesspiegel Readers’ Jury Award.

Accreditation, by contrast, is a centralising function. It requires a single recognised body that can speak for a national film culture rather than a network of equals, and it is precisely the kind of function a horizontal hub is not built to perform. The Belarusian Independent Film Academy (BIFA) became that body. It launched at the 2023 Berlinale, its constitutional moment marked by the European Film Academy’s recognition. BIFA was invited as the first member of the EFA’s newly formed association of national film academies. Its substance has been the representational and protective labour that national film academies exist to perform: standing as the recognised Belarusian interlocutor within the European film-academy structure and lobbying on behalf of independent filmmakers before supranational institutions. By July 2024, BIFA had become one of 21 founding members of the Federation of Film Academies Europe, the body in which it officially represents Belarus (Belarusian Independent Film Academy 2024a; FACE 2024). BIFA’s protective mandate became concrete with arrest of director Andrei Gnyot (Andrėĭ Hniot) at Belgrade airport in October 2023 on an Interpol notice issued at Belarus’s request; after a year of detention and sustained international advocacy, including from BIFA, Serbia declined to extradite him (PEN International 2024; Lalic 2024). Recognition, it turns out, is load-bearing.

Much of the story of exhibition and distribution in exile runs through a single figure: Volia Chajkouskaya, who founded and directed the Northern Lights Festival and launched the VODBLISK online theatre. The Northern Lights Nordic-Baltic Film Festival, which she founded in 2015 and continues to direct, screened Nordic and Baltic cinema in Minsk, Homel, and Vitsebsk until the post-election crackdown forced it online in 2020; since 2022 it has operated as a hybrid event in partnership with the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, with on-site screenings in Estonia and Lithuania and a digital track for viewers inside Belarus. In March 2023 Chajkouskaya launched VODBLISK (Belarusian for ‘reflection’), the only digital platform dedicated to independent Belarusian cinema. VODBLISK combines transactional video-on-demand with territorial differentiation: viewers outside Belarus pay five dollars for a thirty-day rental window, while viewers inside the country watch free of charge. The free tier is a protective arrangement rather than a promotion. Under the regime’s expanding ‘extremist material’ jurisprudence, a payment record is itself a trace (Modern Times Review 2024).

In the absence of a national film fund, a state-administered cinematheque, or any domestic distributor willing to handle independent material, VODBLISK is simultaneously a distributor, an archive, and a rights-management infrastructure. The state’s distribution functions have not been replaced. They have been redistributed – picked up by private actors and supranational supporters, then refunctioned to suit a cinema whose audience is split by a border. The vulnerability here is economic: a niche catalogue serving a small audience, sustained by grants and donations rather than revenue, with financial sustainability its central difficulty by the platform’s own account (VODBLISK n.d.a).

Between 2023 and 2025, films made in exile broke through to the international festival circuit: [Radzima] / Motherland (Alexander Mihalkovich [Aliaksandr Mihalkovich] and Hanna Badziaka, 2023, Sweden/Ukraine/Norway), reviewed by Jakob Wunderwald in this volume, took the Dox:Award at CPH:DOX in 2023; [Pad shėrym nebam] / Pod szarym niebem / Under the Grey Sky (Mara Tamkovich, 2024, Poland), also reviewed here by I.Kh., premiered at Tribeca in 2024; and [Zvaranyia razam] / Welded Together (Anastasiya Miroshnichenko [Anastasiia Mirashnichėnka], 2025, France/Netherlands/Belgium) won the Grand Jury Award in the International Competition at Sheffield DocFest in 2025. By 2025, Belarusian cinema had an audience the pre-2020 industry never reached. The infrastructure that delivered that audience, however, was failing at both ends.

On 27 August 2025 VODBLISK suspended streaming to migrate to new hosting infrastructure (VODBLISK 2025); as of July 2026 no resumption had been announced, and while the catalogue remained browsable, the films themselves could not be streamed (VODBLISK n.d.b). In January 2026 a Vitsebsk court added the Northern Lights Film Festival’s website – and Chajkouskaya’s personal Facebook account – to the Republican List of Extremist Materials (Reform.by 2026b), and in March 2026 the KGB designated the festival itself an ‘extremist formation’, naming Chajkouskaya among its members and criminalising engagement with its materials for audiences inside Belarus (Reform.by 2026a) – a measure aimed precisely at the digital track that had made domestic exhibition possible. The two institutions mark the poles of this cinema’s condition: precarious enough to be silenced by a stalled migration, and consequential enough to be criminalised by the state it escaped.

Historiographical functions – canon formation, critical evaluation – were rebuilt alongside the rest, and on the same distributed pattern. In 2021, the Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award was launched outside Belarus. Its beginnings, mission, and operational ethos in exile are discussed in the interview with co-founders Irena Kaciałovič and an anonymous founder based in Belarus (Red Heather interview, this volume). In 2024, for the centenary of Belgoskino, BIFA conducted an expert poll that produced a list of The 50 Greatest Belarusian Films: [Idzi i hliadzi] / Idi i smotri / Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985, BSSR) came first, Akupatsyia. Mistėryi / Mysterium Occupation (Andrei Kudinenko [Andrėĭ Kudzinenka], 2004, Belarus) second, with 30 of the 50 films drawn from the post-Soviet period (Belarusian Independent Film Academy 2024b). The list was less a prescriptive canon than an act: a deliberate withdrawal of the nation’s cinematic heritage from the state apparatus that nominally administers it. That the withdrawal takes the form of a canon is worth noting, since the diaspora has begun building lists at the very moment the Western field has turned against them. The second volume takes up that asymmetry; here it is enough to say that a canon does different work under conditions of active erasure, where its risk is disappearance rather than exclusion (see Red Heather interview discussion around canon formation in Belarus).

Together, these five institutions, BFN, BIFA, VODBLISK, Northern Lights, and the Red Heather Awards, form a working substitute for the country’s film industry, distributed across half a dozen European jurisdictions. We call the resulting configuration networked diasporic governance: cultural infrastructure sustained across borders by practitioners coordinating through digital platforms and personal networks in place of state institutions. By governance we mean more than service provision: these institutions also hold the authority to certify a film as Belarusian and to vouch for it before the European bodies that decide what counts as a national cinema, an authority exercised from outside the nation and against the state that keeps its name. The qualifier ‘networked’ is not decorative. The same platform architecture that carried the 2020 uprising, the Telegram channels and the clandestine coordination and distribution, is the architecture through which this cinema now produces, circulates, and evaluates itself. The horizontal grammar of the protests became the operating logic of the institutions that succeeded them. Cinema is not unique in this new ecology. Similar diasporic self-organisation can be seen across structures ranging from the Coordination Council initially established by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, to mutual-aid funds like BYSOL and BY_help, to cultural organisations like the Belarusian Council for Culture (Belaruskaia Rada Kulʹtury).

The architecture described here is historically contingent. It has been built under a particular configuration of European cultural-policy resources – Estonian legal registration for BIFA, Lithuanian foreign-ministry funding for VODBLISK, Polish public funding for Belsat, German federal support for BFN’s Berlin operations – and the continued availability of those resources is not guaranteed. The decoupling from the state outlined above is, in practice, a substitution: the apparatus of one state exchanged, by necessity, for the support of others, less coercive and more pluralistic but no less contingent. As Tarnalitsky warns in this issue, access depends on the political climate around immigration and diaspora in the EU. The people who sustain this ecology, meanwhile, work under conditions of precarity: work permits and immigration statuses, family separation, and the economics of survival in exile. A configuration held together by a small set of practitioners in multiple institutional roles is durable in one register and fragile in another; a festival sustained by a single public funder is one funding decision, or personal emergency, away from disappearing. The same is true, at different scales, of every institution catalogued here. Recognition is contingent too, and it is not neutral. International solidarity has been organised around opposition to the Belarusian regime and around the state’s complicity in Russia’s war against Ukraine. These framings are accurate but selective, and the selection has consequences: it decides which films are programmed and which go unseen. Chajkouskaya asks in her interview what it would mean for Belarusian cinema to eschew politics; this volume keeps the question open. A cinema recognised abroad chiefly for its political legibility must eventually discover what it is when the political moment passes. The final doubt belongs to the practitioners themselves. Kozlov and Kutsila are wary that Belarusian cinema is being absorbed, film by film, into the industries that finance it. What this issue documents, then, is an act of institution-building shadowed by its founders’ doubt: whether the cinema they are building for will still be able to call itself Belarusian in a decade.

In confronting these questions, Belarusian cinema joins other cinemas that have worked without the support of their own states for decades. Paluyan describes his Kassel cohort as one shared with students from Iran, Georgia, Russia, and Chile. Living Pictures Production is structurally Belarusian-Iranian-Georgian-German (Paluyan interview, this issue). The European institutions that have hosted BIFA and underwritten VODBLISK have also hosted the post-2022 reconstitution of Ukrainian cinema, the Iranian diasporic infrastructure, and the smaller architectures forming around Hong Kong, Tibetan, and Burmese filmmakers in the same European cities. What is emerging, therefore, is not Belarusian cinema in isolation but a transnational ecology of practitioners working without their own states, passing through the same institutions, accumulating a shared repertoire of strategies. These are fragile institutions sustained by a handful of people and a few public funders, yet their reach exceeds their resources. To centre this cinema in a single volume is itself the decolonial act, and the one our field has scarcely begun. Whether such a cinema can last is the harder question, and the one its contributors, ourselves among them, will continue to ask.

Structure of the Issue

The texts gathered in this issue constitute a first-order archive of an institutional rebuilding still underway – documents produced by the people doing the rebuilding, in the moment of doing it. The volume is organised in three formal sections corresponding to three genres of writing: interviews with film professionals, essays by critics and filmmakers, and film reviews. Cutting across these formal sections, three conceptual nodes offer the reader a cross-referenced reading guide. Several contributions belong to more than one node, reflecting the multiple roles their authors occupy as organisers, curators, critics, and directors. The double organisation, by genre and by node, allows readers to follow the field as both a set of practices and a network of relationships.

Section One. Interviews with the Filmmaking Community

The interview section consists of five conversations ranging from the founding of new cinematic infrastructures in exile to filmmakers’ reflections on the role of cinema in the 2020 uprising. The cinema practitioners interviewed often wear multiple hats as organisers, curators, and directors, and together their interviews offer a holistic view of Belarusian cinema in exile. The section includes a conversation with the co-founders of the Red Heather Belarusian Film Critics Award, Irena Kaciałovič and an anonymous co-founder based in Belarus; an interview with Volia Chajkouskaya, director and founder of BIFA, the VODBLISK online platform, and the Northern Lights Film Festival; an interview with Aliaksei Paluyan, director and BIFA co-founder; an interview with Andrei Kutsila, director and BIFA co-founder; and an interview with Vladimir Kozlov, writer, director, and founder of BFN and its Microbudget Film Incubator.

Section Two. Essays from Exile

The essay section features two original contributions and two reprinted essays. Andrei Kureichik’s original essay charts the history of Belarusian censorship leading up to 2020 from a filmmaker’s perspective in exile, focusing on the fate of Yankovskiy’s Kupala and on Kureichik’s own film Liberté, which had to be smuggled out of the country. Taras Tarnalitsky’s original essay reflects on the state of Belarusian film criticism under repression and exile. The section closes with two reprinted essays by Max Zhbankou, a prominent cultural analyst and a founding member of BFN, whose writing builds the conceptual foundation for the microbudget movement and offers a bird’s-eye view of Belarusian cultural rebuilding in exile.

Section Three. Film Reviews: Belarus 2020: What Everyone Needs to See

The review section gathers nine editorially selected reviews of full-length documentary and feature films that illuminate Belarusian cinema’s response to the 2020 uprising. Five documentary reviews and four feature-film reviews together constitute a suggested viewing list, sequenced to chart the formal and affective range of post-2020 Belarusian cinema.

Reading the Volume by Conceptual Node

Cinematic Infrastructures in Exile offers a comprehensive overview of the segments of the Belarusian film industry reconstituted in exile. Film criticism is represented by the interview with Kaciałovič and the anonymous co-founder of the Red Heather Award, accompanied by Tarnalitsky’s essay on the conditions of Belarusian film criticism under repression. Chajkouskaya’s interview opens with the founding of BIFA and discusses the work of VODBLISK. The BFN is represented by Kozlov’s interview on the Microbudget Film Incubator, accompanied by Zhbankou’s two reprinted essays on microbudget cinema and on Belarusian cultural life in exile.

Filmmakers in Their Own Words reflects on the 2020 uprising and the role of cinema in the directors’ own voices. It includes the interviews with Chajkouskaya and Kozlov, both directors with recently released films they discuss in their interviews, alongside the interviews with Paluyan and Kutsila, whose documentary films directly address the 2020 uprising and are reviewed in this volume. Paluyan reflects from Kassel on his film practice that has been transnationally located since 2012 through Living Pictures Production, his Belarusian-Iranian-Georgian-German company. Kutsila discusses the continuity of his documentary practice before and after 2020, the ethics of documentary filmmaking in exile, and the conditions under which both can be sustained. This node also includes Kureichik’s essay, which approaches the 2020 rupture through the censorship apparatus that preceded it.

Belarus 2020: What Everyone Needs to See, the review section read as a node, and functions as the volume’s suggested viewing list. The documentary reviews trace a formal arc across the post-2020 corpus, an arc that is partly a response to the prior media saturation of the events the films address. Belarus: Recalculating Route (Shved, 2020) registers the rupture as it breaks the film’s planned form. Courage (Paluyan, 2021) registers the same rupture obliquely, in the disciplined chamber rhythm of theatrical labour under siege. When Flowers Are Not Silent (Kutsila, 2021) refuses the visual lexicon of the protest documentary altogether and concentrates on the women whose unspectacular endurance the regime had to break in order to govern. Mara (Kulak, 2022) moves the documentary into performative and poetic registers. [Radzima] / Motherland (Mihalkovich and Badziaka, 2023) archaeologises the cruelty of August 2020 by tracing it backwards through the inherited Soviet hazing culture of dedovshchina (hazing) in the Belarusian army. Read as a sequence, the reviews chart a movement from observation broken by event, to observation sustained against it, to the post-spectacular interior, to the performative-poetic, and finally to the investigative.

The four feature-film reviews begin with Kupala (Yankovskiy, 2020), discussed as the case that heralded the unravelling of the fragile compromise between the state and independent cinema. The other feature films, made underground or in exile, offer diverse reflections on the 2020 uprising through fictionalised narratives that process national trauma. These films chart the nebulous “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) that Naficy connects to accented cinema as “undeniable personal and social experiences that … [are] not yet fully recognised or formalized … rooted in filmmakers’ profound experiences of deterritorialization” (Naficy 2001, 26). Preoccupations with home and belonging, identity and moral choice, take centre stage in films that span genres from dark fairy tale to dystopian satire to social drama. A Kid’s Flick (Nikita Lavretski (Mikita Laŭretski), 2021, Belarus), reviewed by Anonymous, is the first Belarusian feature film made about the protests. Shot on a cell phone, this underground Minsk production addresses the protests obliquely through a dark fantasy allegory in which an ordinary Belarusian woman, moved to protest by injustice, becomes a magic anime warrior who battles and, crucially, defeats evil. Pratsėsy / Processes (Andrei Kashperski (Andrėĭ Kashperski) and Mihas Zui (Mikhasʹ Zui), 2023, Poland), reviewed by Volha Valoshkina, is a Belsat-financed YouTube anthology series – a Belarusian Black Mirror whose dystopian Kafkaesque sketches enumerate the toll of repression, propaganda, and violence in a grotesque black-comedy register whose affective resonance is, paradoxically, one of liberating and therapeutic laughter. Under the Grey Sky (Mara Tamkovich, 2024), reviewed by I.Kh., is a minimalist social drama based on the imprisonment of Belsat journalist Katsiaryna Andreeva (Katsiaryna Andrėeva) and the effort of her partner Ihar Ilyash (Ihar Ilʹiash) to bring her home. The film began as an award-winning short [U zhyvym ėfiry] / Na Żywo / Live (Poland 2022) the director completed at Wajda Film School that hosts Film Bridge Belarus programme. Shot with limited funding from the Polish Film Institute, it is a chamber drama study in morality and in living one’s truth under conditions of violence and isolation. Its title is a line from a song performed by Zmitser Vaitsiushkevich, a Belarusian rock musician: I was born here, in the country under the grey sky … I was born here, and I will live here … I will live.¹²

The structures of feeling articulated in the feature films are particularly attuned to the affective registers of loss and grief that bind a person to a home that has become unrecognisable or is no longer there. In this way, the feature films presented in this issue are also doing the work of healing the traumas of 2020.

When Vaitsiushkevich tours the diasporas, he sometimes performs his song with one word changed. The diasporic version goes “I was born here, and I will live … there.” “Here” and “there”, in post-2020 Belarusian cinema, are not opposites. They are the two ends of the same sentence, and the pause between them is where the work is being done. What is more, the bodies that sing these lines move. Sometimes back and forth between here and there, sometimes between one there and another. Asked in her interview which values might ground a Belarusian cinema no longer tied to a state or a territory, Volia Chajkouskaya answered with community, with solidarity, with coming-together, and then, in English, with this: “People are gold, people are the most important thing.” This volume is theirs. We invite the reader in.

Sasha Razor
University of California Santa Barbara
sasharazor@ucsb.edu

Volha Isakava
Central Washington University
Volha.Isakava@cwu.edu

Bio

Sasha Razor is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, United States, specialising in East European and Russophone cinemas. Her research interests include silent film, minor cinemas, digital authoritarianism, and the cinema and visual culture of protest. Razor is a curator, journalist, and co-founder of the Russophone Los Angeles Research Collective. Her current research is on Belarusian cinema after 2020 and its exile and digital circulation.

Volha Isakava is a Professor and Chair in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Central Washington University, United States. Her research interests include popular visual culture and cinema of East Slavic countries, transnational genre cinema, and horror film in particular. Her latest publications are on horror cinema in Belarus, war in Ukraine on film, and screen representations of drag queens in Russia. Her current research is on contemporary Belarusian underground cinema.

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Filmography

Abramchik, Olga. 2021. [My ne vedali adno adnaho da hėtaha leta] / My ne znali drug druga do etogo leta / We Didn’t Know Each Other Until This Summer. Current Time TV.

Chajkouskaya, Volia. 2025. [Ne stvoranyia dlia palityki] / Not Made for Politics. Allfilm / Yuzu Productions / Sorrento Productions.

Kashperski, Andrei (dir.), and Mihas Zui (writer). 2023. Pratsėsy / Processes. Belsat TV.

Klimov, Elem. 1985. [Idzi i hliadzi] / Idi i smotri / Come and See. Belarusfilm / Mosfilm.

Kudinenko, Andrei. 2004. Akupatsyia. Mistėryi / Mysterium Occupation. Navigator Film.

Kulak, Sasha. 2022. Mara. Les Steppes.

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

Kutsila, Andrei. 2019. [Stryptyz i vaĭna] / Striptiz i wojna / Strip and War. Studio Sonica for Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2021. [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent. Belsat TV.

Lavretski, Nikita. 2021. A Kid’s Flick. Self-produced.

Maminau, Mikalai. 2023. [Khronika suchasnastsi] / Khronika nastoiashchego / Chronicle of the Present. Delfi.

Mihalkovich, Alexander and Hanna Badziaka. 2023. [Radzima] / Motherland. Sisyfos Film / Voka Films / Folk Film.

Miroshnichenko, Anastasiya. 2025. [Zvaranyia razam] / Welded Together. Little Big Story / Witfilm / Stenola Productions.

Mozhar, Pavel. 2021. [Metadychka] / Handbuch / Handbook. Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.

Paluyan, Aliaksei. 2021. [Smelastsʹ] / Courage. Living Pictures Production.

Semashko, Yuri. 2025. [Lebiadzinaia pesnia Fiodara Ozerava] / The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov. Artbox / Shoot’n’Post / Belarusian Filmmakers Network / Singo.

Shved, Maksim. 2020. [Belarusʹ: marshrut perabudavany] / Belarus: marshrut perestroen / Belarus: Recalculating Route. Current Time TV.

Tamkovich, Mara. 2022. [U zhyvym ėfiry] / Na Żywo / Live. Wajda Studio / Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych / Belsat TV.

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

Yankovskiy, Vladimir. 2020. Kupala. Belarusfilm.

Suggested Citation

Razor, Sasha, and Volha Isakava. 2026. “Editorial Introduction: Belarusian Cinema after 2020”. 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.2026.00022.441.

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

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