On that background, the festivals "Paŭnočnaje źziańnie" ("Northern Lights") and "Bulbamovie" look like a continuation of the forced work of splitting – like attempts to pull cinema out of the memorial-bureaucratic framework.
Warsaw's "Bulbamovie", which last year was a festival of the filmmakers strongly protesting against violence, this year turned into an offline platform for the diaspora. "Paŭnočnaje źziańnie" announced its task of uniting the dispersed audience and organized online screenings, which are useful primarily because viewers in Belarus, who are generally deprived of Belarusian cinema, managed to watch something.
The programmes of both festivals mixed films from different times. It can be seen from them that time has changed, among other things: films dedicated to protests are still being made, but they are already being overlapped by another stream of films created or completed in exile, when the protest theme has left the agenda. We are at the point where they still interact, but we will soon pass this stage.
For now, the surrealist postdoc "Dream", a kind of dim memory of the protests from the present, is in the programme next to the unfounded teenage drama "Summer 1989" (about the holiday history of 1989, yes). The documentary "When the flowers are not silent" is focused on the testimony of the protests, with the self-contained construct "Meeting in Minsk" about post-protest Minsk. The same "Courage" by Alaksiej Pałujan – with Andrej Kuciła's new film "Baptism" after leaving Belarus.
In such a mix of protest and non-protest films, we should not lose one that does not serve either trend: the documentary "And Again Belarus" in the "Bulbamovie" programme – signed by the name "Ivan Fiodaraŭ" and the only one dedicated to the case with migrants, which passed for cinema unnoticed, because it fell into the gap between the post-protest terror and the war in Ukraine.
Apart from the actual physical danger of filming migrants, there was another, less noticeable, but perhaps the most important reason why the cinema broadcast those events: it seems that it has long since weaned itself from working with the Other, which does not exist in the local film universe anymore. The division into "own" and "others" is so impenetrable and fundamental that looking at the Other is in itself a "thought crime", especially if that Other is from the "others'" camp.
While the community is more divided than ever and is trying to somehow show solidarity by looking for "collaborators" and singling out the "addicts", "And again Belarus" masterfully highlights the scale of the space that remains out of the attention of cinema due to this fragmentation.
But cinema also has another difficult, unsolvable task, related to "own" and "others": to preserve a cultural presence, at least a symbolic one, in Ukraine. This task is gradually being solved thanks to the festival "1084. On the border", which was organized by the Belarusian human rights organization "Zviano" in Kyiv and Lviv at the end of the year, and then online. Doing work that requires great community effort is once again left to individual volunteers. This is how Belarusian cinema has always been. But isn't that why the film academy was created to finally start in a different way?