Populär Vun Belarus

Godforsaken places where people live detached from society are still present in the world. But Belarus, a country integrated into civilisation processes, can hardly boast of their existence. The authors tell the stories of two families residing in Rasony district, in a forest close to the border with Russia. Having gone bush they do without electricity, communication and other habiliments of civilisation. Being eager to start a new life they came back to the native country from big cities – Moscow, Saint Petersburg... But their dreams and expectations confronted Belarus's reality...

KGB officers present junior schoolchildren with a golden ticket granting a tour around the magical KGB building. There, kids are shown the supernatural working methods of the most important and patriotic agency in the country: non-contact fighting, blindfolded shooting, and telepathy. At the end of the excursion, the KGB employees give the most resilient students the opportunity to feel like real patriots and personally get a confession from the traitors to the country with the help of electric shocks.

Vasil Granouski is 58. He's living in a village, where he leads a local choir. It consists of only elderly performers. The harmonic Vasil plays is also old, and it lacks a couple of keys. His car, in which he drivers the singers around, is faulty and doesn't always start.

An old woman lives in a remote village in Belarus. As the end of her live approaches, she starts to read the worn-out notebooks of her daughter. Together we go on a journey to the unknown world of a person who is abandoned and forgotten by everybody.

The main character is in the Minsk pre-trial detention center on Volodarsky st., which in 2020 became the main place of imprisonment for people who took part in the protests. This place is the so-called „foster of intellectuals”, because a large number of Belarusian intelligentsia served their terms there, starting from the time of the famous and significant Kalinovsky uprising in the XIXth century.

The complex life of simple figures.

Druya is a small and old town. The most fascinating about it is not its history, not specific dates and names of people, but the atmosphere. Looking at the surviving walls and furnishings, the imagination itself depicts the history of this place. Sometimes in the empty half-abandoned architectural monuments one can feel the rumble of past epochs, the weight of centuries oversaturated with events.

“We are living on the edge”, says a simple peasant woman from Dubna, a village in Hrodna region. These words sound symbolic: the village is situated on the steep bank of the Neman, and the river keeps undermining the houses and the plots making the villagers seek for new lands.

Documentary short by Volha Dashuk about amateur filmmaker Anatol Schneider.

The father of the main character is invited to the All-Belarusian People's Assembly. There, he is shaken by the hand of President Lukashenko himself. This fact causes very strong emotions in the father, as a result of which he goes on a long-term binge. During the binge, presidential elections are held in Belarus, in which the opposition unexpectedly wins. Belarus is transformed into a classic capitalist system. Worried about his father's life, the son decides to hide this fact from him.

Yakov Deryabin returns from prison, where he ended up thanks to his wife, and suffers in search of work and housing. No one takes part in the fate of a kind and unfortunate man. And while he sleeps in the entrance of an apartment building under the stairs...

Breaking taboos: Belarusian contemporary artist Aliaksei Kuzmich gives us the keys to understanding his art of action.

Residents of the village in Gomel oblast' tell legends about forest spirits and features of communicating with them. Old customs and superstitions have survived to our days.

Where is this train going? Passengers are lulled to sleep by the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, familiar poetic lines about the native land, and folk songs. Is it possible to change the direction, to hop on another train, to rewind the tape? Quavering reflections dance in a strange roundelay: the grain, a girl, a stork, a bone, the truth, and the resentment... Welcome to the Gray Edge.

The woodcarver Mikalai Vasilevich Tarasiuk, a folk craftsman of Belarus, lived in Pruzhanshchyna. Near his house is a unique museum "Memories of the Fatherland", which has no analogues in the country. The self-taught master carves figurines from wood, decorates them with vines and straw, and arranges them into scenes from peasant life and everyday life. Specialists call this kind of activity instinctive art. That is, his creativity was formed naturally and such is free from the sphere of any professional influence. Through the personality of the hero and his wooden people, the film provides an opportunity to join the ancient way of life of Belarusians, which is gradually disappearing.

Set on the Kazakh steppe in 1913 under the dual oppression of local reactionaries and Tsarist rule, the story follows Botagundz, a once-ignorant girl who, inspired by the exiled Kuznetsov, awakens to revolutionary truth. Transformed into a resolute communist fighter, she dedicates herself to overthrowing the old regime and helping establish the Kazakh Soviet government for her people’s liberation.

In 2020, the biggest protests against the government to date formed in Belarus. The protesters were met with violence and restrictions, many of them were given draconian prison sentences. A dangerous climate that sought to nip political activism in the bud took hold. For “Who, If Not Us? The Fight for Democracy in Belarus,” Juliane Tutein filmed and researched for three years in a country that had not seen a change of elites with its supposed independence in 1991. She discovered mainly women at the forefront of the courageous protesters. This portrait is dedicated to three of them: Nina Baginskaya, in her mid-seventies and active in the fight for an open Belarus since the 1980s, Tatsyana “Tanya” Hatsura-Yavorskaya, founder of the human rights film festival “Watch Docs”, and Darya Rublevskaya, the youngest at 22, who works for the “Viasna” human rights centre founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski.