The Republic of Belarus has a population of 9 million and lies in the heart of Eastern Europe, but the world knows very little about it. A constituent republic of the USSR since the Second World War, it became one of the most prosperous parts of the Soviet Union. After its independence, it has been ruled with an iron fist by President Alexander Lukashenko. Government restrictions on political and civil freedoms, freedom of speech, religion, the press, and peaceful assembly have tightened in the wake of the disputed presidential election in 2020. The election results sparked large-scale protests as opposition and civil society members criticised the election’s validity, but Lukashenko quelled the protests and remained in power. Belarus retained close political and economic ties to Russia and is heavily dependent on it for its energy supplies. Since 2022, Belarus has facilitated Russia’s war in Ukraine, which was launched in part from Belarusian territory. This is the background of the film Processes by Andrei Kashperski, a feature that will be screened among the 16 films in the competition section of the goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Meticulous analysis
Massive participation in the protest, exaggerated number of arrests of innocent people, harmlessness of the protesters, and ingenuity of their jailers. The tentacles of the system reaching the youngest members of society, the cruelty of the Russia-inspired secret service approaches, and the silent complicity of the ordinary citizens. Disinterested participation of the bureaucracy, the hypocrisy of the administrators, but also the fear of the power that reaches deep into the people’s minds and dreams. Belarus involvement in the Ukrainian war, numerous soldiers never returning from the front, mothers searching in vain for their sons, and engaged covering-up by the popular media. In the film, the power mechanisms of contemporary Belarus are subjected to a meticulous analysis that brings to light the vicious and boundless repression. The narrative approach applied by Kashperski and his co-scriptwriter Mikhail Zui is neither documentary nor dramatic. Instead, they address the harsh reality of contemporary Belarus using irony and satire.
The tentacles of the system reaching the youngest members of society, the cruelty of the Russia-inspired secret service approaches, and the silent complicity of the ordinary citizens.
Political satire
Satire has been a strong instrument of political criticism since antiquity. The success of The Onion News Network (2011) fuelled the proliferation of political satire in mass media globally, and for some time, there was, almost literally, no major national TV in the world that would not have its parody TV news. Some of these programs have been preserved to this day, from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015 – present) in the US, to Striscia la notizia (1988 – present) and Fratelli di Crozza (2009 – present) in Italy.
Today, the implicit assumption of the satire that reality is stranger than fiction has reached its extremes. The everyday reality far exceeds the most vivid imagination. Think about the presidential candidates in one of the biggest world democracies resembling cartoon characters and the existence of AI software that considers 200 civilians as acceptable collateral damage for killing one military chief. In such a world, the genre of satire is more challenging than ever. The creators of the Processes have been well aware of it. The minutely structured script, flawless cinematography, and high production value throughout distinguish this sad and simultaneously humorous film. It was initially designed as a TV series, with each of the four parts (Fostering, Patriotic Enlightenment, Dreamed, and TV Programme) a distinct episode. Yet together, the episodes fit the structure of a film omnibus well, and the final episode, the parody of a reality TV show, meaningfully concludes the referencing cycle of the parody. The episode features parodies of several TV genres, from news and advertisements to talk shows. The latter, a notorious fabricator of fake news, has the role of convincing an innocent citizen to fabricate fake news.
A mushroom
Such a rigorous approach is also the merit of the particular tradition of political satire that came to prominence in the Soviet Union in the 1990s under the Russian name of “stiob” and was characterised by a particularly strong identification with the object, person, or idea, at which it was directed. So much so that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two. One of the most well-known “stiobs” was the action of multimedia artist and political activist Sergey Kuryokhin, who, posing as a scholar in a popular current affairs program in 1991, presented the results of his study indicating that Lenin was a mushroom and that the Russian revolution of October 1917 was made by people who had been taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. In the process of consumption, these mushrooms altered their personalities so that they effectively became mushrooms themselves.
In times of Kuryokhin, this approach provided a reasonably safe strategy of poking fun at an authoritarian regime in decline, no longer scary enough to laugh at in secret only but still scary enough not to laugh at openly.
Andrei Kashperski, a Belarusian independent filmmaker of the youngest generation, chose this strategy to fight propaganda in the post-Soviet space. He is the author of a moku-mentary series, Goosin, published on a popular YouTube Channel in 2018. In 2020, he created and directed a Chin Chin Channel, a project that mocks Belarusian state propaganda and Belarusian officials. He is a member of the group of independent Belarus filmmakers trying to revive their national film industry. Due to the internal repression and human rights abuses after the 2020 elections, the EU has imposed sanctions against the Belarus regime. Poland and Lithuania do not recognise Lukashenko as the legitimate president of Belarus. Lithuania hosts the members of the Belarusian opposition in Vilnius. Poland hosts Belsat TV, an independent broadcaster for Belarus, and also the producer of the film Processes. The presentation of the film in the goEast Festival competition section is an excellent opportunity for the critical voices from Belarus to be heard globally.
