The struggle of ordinary Belarusians to free their country from the iron grip of a former collective farm boss not known for his sensitivity or appreciation of the finer things in life has all but disappeared from the radar of mainstream media in Western Europe.
The burst of enthusiastic mass pro-democracy demonstrations in the summer of 2020, when Belarusians poured out onto the streets of Minsk, the capital, and across the country to protest yet another round of falsified election results under ‘Lukasuka’ (a rather rude and derogatory insult used for Alexander Grigoryevich – in power since 1994), galvanised a people living in a quasi-Soviet state for decades.
Suppressed with trademark extreme violence, tens of thousands fled, were locked up, or were deported without documents. One leading opposition activist – Marina Kolesnikova, now living in exile in Germany – was taken to the border, but tore up her passport in the neutral zone and was taken back to argue her case in court. Convicted on charges, among other things, of conspiracy to seize power, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Following international pressure, she was freed along with 122 other political prisoners in a US-brokered deal. More than a thousand other Belarusian pro-democracy activists remain in prison.
Kutsila, who has lived in Łódź, Poland since 2020, dives into the stories of just a small handful of those «politicals» – identified in the dreary confines of Belarusian penal institutions by yellow markers on their prison uniforms.
Letters from a Silenced Country opens with the letters from the mother of one 50-year-old activist, whose apparently boundless optimism is – literally – beaten out of him. It is no spoiler to say that he ends up dead; who can survive such regular physical punishment by the thugs and goons who pass for prison warders in this Godforsaken territory wedged between Russia to the east and Poland to the west?
His death, seen via CCTV footage as he slumps to the ground in his spartan cell, his head bandaged from a severe beating a day or so before, is horrifying.
Worse is to come.
How the director managed to obtain video filmed by Belarusian KGB officers (yes, they still call the secret police the KGB there; in Russia that old gang of bastards is known as the FSB – the Federal Security Service, rather than the Committee for State Security) heavens only knows – but the attempt to seize an anti-government protestor identified months after the street rallies of 2020 goes badly wrong. Determined not to be taken from his apartment, the young man (seen in home Smartphone footage Kutsila also managed to find) raises a shotgun as the KGB men break down the door after their repeated demands to «open up» are ignored. The first man is taken down by a blast from both barrels, seen in the footage. Bloodied and moaning, he is dragged back by his now gun-toting – and terrified – buddies, leaving swathes of bright red blood streaking the tiled floor. The target of their «investigation» dies in the ensuing gun battle.
Uncomfortable, urgent filmmaking from a director determined to put Belarus and the plight of its people back on the global agenda.
The animated drawings of a very young woman (20 when arrested and tried for her apparently subversive wish to lead a normal, free life) take viewers into the depths of the Belarusian Gulag. Grim visions of grey and gritty cells, inhabited by grey and gritty characters, even when the women with whom she shares incarceration are depicted in animated drawings, naked and showering.
Sewing camouflaged military and police fatigues – the virtually unpaid work-cum-slave-labour, she and her fellow female convicts are forced to do – allows her snatched moments of passive resistance, sketching small drawings to include in the letters she is permitted to send home.
But eventually even that small concession is banned: art threatens the thin-skinned Lukasuka and must be forbidden, torn asunder by grim prison censors, represented by an omnipresent Eye of Sauron that hovers over many of these animated scenes.
When free
The director wraps with the story of a former Belarusian police CID (Criminal Investigation Department) officer. Disturbed by what he witnessed during the 2020 protests, he turns against his old world of toeing the line and turning a blind eye to the iniquities of Lukasuka’s Belarus, and becomes a vocal opponent of the regime. That does not go down well with his old crowd, and the threats against him and his family begin. He flees to Russia, but is deported when his recent anti-government past catches up with him (he claims the Russian police simply did not know what to do with him). He manages to give them the slip at the border and, after a long trek back through Belarus and then crossing the border into Poland via Białowieża Forest – the remnants of the vast primaeval forest that once stretched across the European plain – he surfaces in Warsaw.
Subject to suspicions by the Polish authorities, we see him being questioned to verify his story – checking that he is not a Fifth Columnist. Apparently verified, today he runs a deep anti-regime investigation platform, finding footage from the Belarusian penal system, identifying the brutal thugs that police it (both men and women) to prepare the necessary evidence for later – when Belarus is a free country – to prevent these people whom he considers low-life scum from evading the justice he is sure will come.
Letters from a Silenced Country – which screened out of competition at the Venice IFF in September – is uncomfortable, urgent filmmaking from a director determined to put Belarus and the plight of its people back on the global agenda.
