We have something to congratulate Belarusian cinema on though it's not perfect timing for any congratulations. It took two years of repression, emigration, scattering of cinema and spectator communities, pushing into the external space, going underground so that cinema could gradually regain its long-lost functions — speak about the reality and serve the communication of people.

Moreover, cinema has started to fulfil an atypical supportive and solidarizing function. Belarusians watch it in order to primarily feel a sense of belonging together. We assume that all upcoming changes of Belarusian cinema will be connected to this odd function. Get ready, we are entering the area of uniting pathos, unification and mythology — do you recognize all that stuff which official cinema has been trying to create for decades with the help of the weak-skilled "Belarusfilm", only being based on another type of material?

So this is what we had over the summer in the solidarizing foreign film distribution.

In June in Tbilisi there was probably the first beyond the festival screening of the documentary about the protests "The Dream" by Saša Kulak. At least it was the first screening available to the non-festival audience — and in the city where the diaspora lives. In July there was an online premiere of the documentary "Across the rails" by Anton Sivyсh about Lodz expat students, which was actively promoted by the diaspora itself. The film "Courage" by Aliaksiej Palujan has already got the protest manifest status and was regularly shown in all diasporas from Germany to Georgia and across half the globe in the USA. Quite a lengthy documentary "The White Sun of the Red Summer" by Palina Idrysava, Jana Nova and Hlieb Asmaloŭski was shown in Vilnius, Warsaw, Gdansk and Tbilisi. There were screenings of "When the flowers are not silent" by Andrej Kucila in Munich and other European cities. The Belarusians of New York organized the screening of Sierž Charytonaŭ's documentary "The Long Way Home".

There was a Tbilisi screening of "The House Is Where I Am?" by Arciom Lobač. In the middle of the summer there was an online presentation of the documentary about Paŭlina Skurko "Letters from prison" by Tacciana Haŭryĺčyk (one of the few cases about the current reality inside the country, which is really significant). All summer long in Warsaw there were museum screenings of protest short films of the "Revolution" art project by Daša Bryjan and Maryja Kruk.

Probably never before has our hopeless narrative of absence and escapism broken through with the help of quite consistent stories about the objective social reality. To a great extent it's true because of the consistent narrative structure of the protests themselves — the story with the beginning and the ending. The protests are easy to tell. Maybe this is the real beginning of our story.

The language of this narrative is quite the same in every film. It doesn't have too many techniques because the narrative doesn't need a sophisticated language: it's the narrative of a victim and a witness. It's enough to have synchronized witnesses and victims who comment, reveal their personal but not too unique (which is important) experience about the chronicle shots of protests and repression.

As a solidarizing narrative, the protest storyline lays claim to be a universal myth. And it means that it has to get rid of too individual and unsafe plots and feelings which can not be shared by everyone.
Complying with it, for example, Sierž Charytonaŭ in his "The Long Way Home" starts very early with a family story from the WWII period but then immediately switches to the approved narrative about the shared experience of fighting with injustice. While preserving the same structures of the myth, "The White Sun of the Red Summer" retells what we already know. And sometimes it's hard to watch the film — both because of traumatic memories, naturally, and also due to that certain structure of the myth which requires to replicate the same plot known in advance.

This is where we’d be worried — what we need more now is solidarity. And for that feeling we are ready to sacrifice both the variety of form and content and the nuances of emotion while displacing such unsafe emotions as doubt, disappointment, mistrust and simply just a too different experience. For example, the uncomfortable story of Raman Pratasievič is not included in the protest myth of any film.

But sooner or later we'll have to say all that aloud. And the new growing point will be in that specific grey area.

In order to realize it, we'll have to destroy the established form of the protest narrative. Saša Kulak in the film "The Dream" has already made a significant attempt to break through this wall — so as to pronounce the word "disappointment" without saying it aloud. For that reason impersonality/universality (which became a necessary element of the protest narrative) had to be made a specific technique - masks had to be given not only to the AMAP riot police but to the protesters.

The art project "Revolution", while not daring to comprehend, raises the same uncomfortable question related to the issue of responsibility. In short staged (which you should pay attention to) scenes the art project shows different protest actors. The project uses depersonalized and generalized images of enforcers and officials in the films "0908" https://youtu.be/-fiZICuaXS8, "000109" https://youtu.be/bv5QtACA8Qo and "2022" https://youtu.be/ebuusyZI9OA. But it gives an exact personality to the workers when recording Siarhiej Dylieŭski's monologue in the film "1991" https://youtu.be/QREpxr0NQKs — and it's a remorseful monologue, concerning the failure of strikes at factories.

This will be our next challenge: to finally resolve the issue with impersonality and to personalize everything which was depersonalized/generalized before. In other words, in order to reach another level, we need a documentary or a fiction film where an enforcer (a depersonalized mythologized creature from the other side — i.e. from the other world) becomes a real person. But it will be a very dangerous narrative for both sides of the protest and for both sides of the border line. Here we can give you some hope: nevertheless, we have certain people in the obedient Belarusian cinema who can be so arrogant. One person. Finally do it, Dzima [Here the author refers to Zmitsier Dzyadok who will do it his way anyway and that's why it will be like it should].

As far as local Belarusian cinema is concerned, we'd like to mention that this year it surprised us with some noticeable events but for now we'll focus on the most significant one. "Belarusfilm" pleased us with an announcement of the film about Western Belarus in the interwar period.
The news made a splash, but actually only one nuance is worth our attention in this bureaucratic cinema activity: when the Ministry of Culture announced a tender for the creation of the film about unity in November 2021, the only good old sparring partner of "Belarusfilm" producer Viktar Labkovič was in jail.

The tender was unsuccessful due to the lack of players. But it didn't stop the Ministry of Culture from sponsoring "Belarusfilm" through their bureaucratic rituals and thereby mentioning the fact that the official cinema completely switched to the Soviet model of existence and now it doesn't need the imitation of democratic procedures, competition, etc. You shouldn't doubt that the film will be about Poland. "Belarusfilm" has been avoiding statements for many decades not just waiting for the moment to express it purposefully and responsibly.

By the end of the summer "Belarusfilm" even complained in the Soviet apologetic manner that the studio is supervised by the secret policeman/"checkist", which comfortably explained the "unfortunate turn of events" in the company. It's so relentless that you can't go against it. One more time we can only hope for "another" cinema which is made without a secret policeman's control. There's nothing new about it.

Diligently creating an exemplary narrative about protests, we finally started to speak and learnt a simple universal language based on impersonality to some extent. Now we shouldn't forget to pronounce the uncomfortable words which are missing in this narrative, and it will be quite painful.

We can predict that we're going to mythologize emigrant agenda further, create a positive myth about Belarusian expats and simplify the image of internal Belarus to the repression: the formula of a "prison country" will give rise to lots of stories in the future.

We'll be really pleased if anyone at least slightly covers unsafe "grey" areas of the protest narrative and will not be thrashed for that. But most probably we will enter the silence of waiting and will have to do with sporadic amateur reflections on the topic. We are used to it.