Processes (2023) by Andrei Kashperski and Mihas Zui:

Belarusian Black Mirror

Author

Volha Valoshkina

Abstract

The anthology series Pratsėsy / Processes (Andrei Kashperski [Andrėǐ Kashperski] and Mihas Zui [Mikhas’ Zui], 2023), produced for the Warsaw-based Belsat TV and quickly dubbed a Belarusian Black Mirror, pushes the authoritarian everyday of post-2020 Belarus into grotesque, dystopian satire across four short episodes. This review reads the series as therapeutic satire that turns collective fear into laughter, and sees in its festival success the rise of an independent Belarusian cinema that found its form in exile.

Keywords

Andrei Kashperski; Belarusian cinema; Pratsėsy/ Processes; anthology series; political satire; dystopia; 2020 protests; diaspora cinema; Belsat TV; Black Mirror.

The anthology series Pratsėsy / Processes (Andrey Kashperski (Andrėǐ Kashperski) and Mihas Zui [Mikhas’ Zui], 2023, Belarus / Poland) premiered on YouTube in November 2023. Critics and viewers immediately called it a Belarusian Black Mirror. Director Andrei Kashperski and Mihas Zui wrote the screenplay and ran the show. Several of the actors come from the independent troupe Vol’nyia Kupalaŭtsy (the Free Kupala Players), former members of the Yanka Kupala National Theatre who in 2020 spoke out against political repression and the theatre’s new management and were forced into exile. The Polish-Belarusian channel Belsat TV financed the project.

More episodes were planned, but only four were released. They share a grotesque style, dark humour, and political satire, along with a dystopian vision of Belarus in which authoritarian practices are pushed to their limit. According to the creators, this idea gave the series its title: what happens when the processes underway in the country reach their apogee? Each episode is a self-contained short film, far shorter than the feature-length episodes of Black Mirror; the four were later combined into a feature-length cut.

Peratrymka / Foster Care, the first episode, takes its title from a Belarusian volunteer practice: the temporary housing of dogs or cats by people willing to help rescued animals while a permanent home is found. In the series, three young people arrested at a protest end up “in foster care” at the apartment of an OMON (riot police) officer. The conceit is that detention centres and prisons are overflowing, so a new directive requires each security officer to host fifteen days of detention in his own home. He puts the detainees in his children’s bedroom, with a bunk bed serving as plank beds, beats them on schedule with a truncheon, and forces them to do all the housework. They quickly become household slaves. Their hosts start saying it is time to bring back serfdom. “Get four next time, sturdier ones. Mum needs help at the dacha”, the officer’s wife tells him in the closing scene. The episode’s emphasis is striking. The detainees are essentially faceless, since any Belarusian could be in their place, while the OMON officer’s family life takes over the foreground. The result is a paradoxical figure: a “henpecked” security officer who fears and obeys his wife.

In Processes, the grotesque is tightly woven into authoritarian everyday life. In the first episode, the judge sentences the detainees to fifteen days remotely, from a phone screen. This was standard practice in Belarus in 2020. Because of the sheer volume of detainees, court hearings ran by video link, becoming a non-stop conveyor belt of verdicts.

The second episode, Patryiatychnae praktykavanne / Patriotic Exercise, follows a group of schoolchildren rewarded with a field trip to the Belarusian KGB. (The Belarusian security service has retained its Soviet-era name.) This part was filmed in the Palace of Culture and Science, the Stalin-era skyscraper in central Warsaw that the Soviet Union “gifted” to “the Polish people” in the 1950s. The visual style mirrors parodies of Soviet socialist realist posters. But the satirical absurdity turns uncanny by the end of the episode: a KGB general makes the children torture a detainee, then leads them out into the inner courtyard, where he uses a child’s hand to shoot an “enemy of the people”. Only a few children are left at this point. The rest have disappeared one by one over the course of the tour.

Processes is a successful low-budget dystopia, and a great deal of its power comes from the team’s careful attention to detail, meticulously chosen in every episode. An attentive viewer can read the labels on the goods at the shop where the protagonist works as a clerk: a jar marked “Patriotic Caprice. Light Salad,” a row of vodka bottles called “Air” with the slogan “Take a breath, take a break”.

The filmmakers successfully exploit their small budget. For example, in the second episode, cardboard cutouts of KGB officers serve as extras. They stand in the building's courtyard windows, watching as the children are shown the execution.

In the first two episodes, the absence of special effects – which sets the series apart from the British Black Mirror (2011–present) – gives the visual style a particular hyperrealism. In the third and fourth, the same absence becomes a toolkit for building distorted, dreamlike spaces.

The third episode, [Prysnilasia] / Prisnilosʹ / A Dream, takes place in a Belarusian government ministry where every official is faceless and lives at the rhythm of slow, repeating actions, as in a dream. Static shot after static shot creates the sense of a deadened administrative system. The characters are all having the same dream: the funeral of someone whose name they cannot safely say aloud, because the ministry is full of cameras and listening devices. They decide the dream is prophetic.

The fourth episode, Prahrama peradach / Pure and Heartfelt, develops the theme of Belarus as a co-aggressor in the war Russia launched against Ukraine. The protagonist's son is taken away for military exercises but ends up at the front and calls his mother. She hears explosions, and the call is cut off, reinforcing the fact that speaking about the war is forbidden. As far as the media and society are concerned, it does not exist. The mother, who works as a clerk, watches propaganda television at home and actively supports the regime. But she cannot keep from talking about her missing son, and so she ends up a guest on a television programme whose presenter convinces her that she never had a son, just as there is no war: it is all the fantasy of a lonely woman who saw an image of a boy on the box her television set came in…

A recurring phrase unifies the series: “That is just how history worked out” (Tak istoricheski slozhilosʹ). Such appeals to an imagined historical tradition, supposedly justifying the actions of those in power, are a common device in Belarusian and Russian propaganda, and in Processes this device is turned inside out: various characters use it to explain the absurdity of whatever is happening around them.

The feature-length cut of Processes premiered in December 2023 and filled the cinema at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw three times with Belarusians from the diaspora. Over two years, the YouTube episodes have drawn between 500,000 and a million views each.¹ Viewers’ comments after the premiere show that the style and subject matter really affected them. They called the series a terrifying horror film, realistic and paranormal at the same time, evoking the feeling of a madhouse, painful, funny, and frightening, all at the same time. They compared it to George Orwell’s dystopia and The Handmaid’s Tale. Many thanked the creators. Anonymous bots commented heavily as well, predictably accusing the creators of smearing life in Belarus after the protests and the mass emigration.²

Some Belarusian critics were harsher, faulting it for bad taste and accusing it of exploiting collective trauma.³ As a Belarusian who watched the premiere on YouTube and waited impatiently for each new episode, I stand with those who experience Processes as therapeutic. Authoritarian and totalitarian practices, visualised and pushed to absurdity, turn out to be therapeutic precisely because they channel fear, force us to laugh, and make us recognise and not recognise Belarusian realities at the same time. Laughter kills tyrants, and fear, once mediated by the screen, becomes an emotion we can control. These spectator responses reinforce that the team behind Processes have produced: an artistic document of the era.

Processes has been recognised across both the festival and critics’ circuits: it won the Quick Killer Award for short-form work at the seventh Serial Killer festival in Brno in September 2024 (Serial Killer 2024), reached the Digital Fiction finals at Prix Italia the same year (REFORM.news 2024), and, leading the field with six nominations, took four prizes at the third Red Heather (Chyrvony veras, the Belarusian Film Critics Award) in Warsaw in February 2026 (Red Heather 2026). What these prizes register is the birth of a cinema in exile, a Belarusian art that found its form only after it had lost its ground.

Volha Valoshkina
Independent Researcher

Translated from Russian by Sasha Razor

Bio

The author’s biography is withheld for their safety.

Bibliography

Belsat. n.d. “Pratsėsy. Seryial” [Processes. TV series]. YouTube playlist. Accessed 30 June 2026. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVQbeKRzza1P99mMY-R1JIWgpd1QwvvHx.

Red Heather. 2026. “Nazvanyia peramozhtsy ‘Chyrvonaha verasu’26’” [The winners of Red Heather ’26 announced]. https://redheatheraward.com/be/news/nazvanyia-peramozcy-cyrvonaga-verasu26-20260228213344. February 28.

REFORM.news. 2024. “Seryial-antalohiia ‘Pratsėsy’, stvorany na ‘Belsat’, staŭ finalistam buĭnoha mizhnarodnaha festyvaliu Prix Italia” [The anthology series Processes, made at Belsat, has become a finalist of the major international festival Prix Italia]. https://reform.news/seryjal-antalogija-pracjesy-stvorany-na-belsat-sta-finalistam-bujnogo-mizhnarodnaga-festyvalja-prix-italia. September 10.

Serial Killer. 2024. “Serial Killer Festival 2024 Knows Its Winners”. https://serialkiller.tv/en/serial-killer-festival-2024-knows-its-winners/. September 28.

Tarnalitski, Taras. 2025. “Rėtsėnziia na miniseryial ‘Pratsėsy’. Rėspublika kryvykh liustėrak” [Review of the miniseries Processes: A republic of crooked mirrors]. Euroradio. https://euroradio.fm/recenziya-na-miniseryyal-pracesy-respublika-kryvykh-lyusterak. August 6.

Filmography

Brooker, Charlie. 2011–present. Black Mirror. Channel 4 / Netflix.

Kashperski, Andrei, and Mikhasʹ Zui. 2023. Pratsėsy / Processes. Belsat TV. Anthology series, four episodes.

Kashperski, Andrei, and Mikhasʹ Zui. 2023. Pratsėsy / Processes. Belsat TV. Feature-length cut.

Suggested Citation

Valoshkina, Volha. 2026. Film review: “Processes (2023) by Andrei Kashperski and Mikhail Zui: Belarusian Black Mirror”. Belarusian Cinema and the Protests of 2020: Cinema in Exile (ed. Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.431.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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