Through the Prism of Politics:

A Conversation with Volia Chajkouskaya on Belarusian Cinema in Exile

Author

Sasha Razor

Abstract

Founder of the Northern Lights Film Festival, producer and director Volia Chajkouskaya (Volia Chaĭkoŭskaia) reflects on building Belarusian cinematic infrastructure in exile through the Northern Lights Film Festival (Paŭnochnae zzianne), the streaming platform VODBLISK, and the Belarusian Independent Film Academy. She discusses the ethics of documenting a repressive regime, the financial and legal precarity of exilic filmmaking, solidarity with Ukrainian cinema, and women’s leadership in the 2020 protests, which animates her debut feature, Not Made for Politics (2025).

Keywords

Volia Chajkouskaya (Volia Chaĭkoŭskaia); Belarusian cinema; cinema in exile; Northern Lights Film Festival (Paŭnochnae zzianne); VODBLISK; national cinema; documentary ethics; women’s leadership; 2020 Belarusian protests.

Interview

What we call the northern lights is really an arrival. Matter flung from the sun travels the whole way invisible and becomes luminous only at the moment it meets resistance. The film festival that borrowed the name began modestly: founded in Minsk in 2015 by Volia Chajkouskaya (Volia Chaĭkoŭskaia), Northern Lights (Belarusian: Paŭnochnae zzianne) set out to show Nordic and Baltic cinema to Belarusian audiences. It has since become the thing its name predicted: a Belarusian cultural institution in exile, programming the nation’s cinema from abroad, for an audience it can no longer safely reach.

Volia Chajkouskaya, a Belarusian producer, director, and festival founder, left Belarus for Tallinn in 2018 to study documentary filmmaking at the Baltic Film and Media School. What began as a period of study abroad became exile after the peaceful uprising of 2020 and the repression that followed. Since then, she has helped build and sustain a fragile but vital infrastructure for Belarusian cinema abroad through Northern Lights Film Festival, the streaming platform VODBLISK, and the Belarusian Independent Film Academy.¹ Each year, she writes what she calls “the festival’s manifesto” in the form of a poem. The 2024 theme turned on the “fluid and ephemeral” nature of identity in exile: a diasporic self assembled from fragments because displacement leaves no other options. The 2025 edition, “We Are Just Kids”, reads as its sequel in a more intimate key, a meditation on responsibility, exhaustion, and the wish to leave light rather than shadow behind.²

The conversation that follows asks what these themes mean in practice: whether “national cinema” still holds when the territory of the nation has become unreachable; whether art made under these conditions can refuse to be read only through politics; and what it costs to keep making, curating, and defending Belarusian cinema when the regime has criminalised the act of filmmaking itself. This interview was conducted asynchronously via Telegram on 28 January 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

SASHA RAZOR (SR): The Northern Lights festival was founded in 2015 as a platform to introduce Belarusian audiences to Baltic and Northern European cinema. After 2020, the festival was forced to move online and effectively ended up in exile. How would you formulate the mission of Northern Lights today compared to where it all started?

VOLIA CHAJKOUSKAYA (VC): Our mission has changed considerably. When we launched the festival in Belarus in 2015, the main task was to promote and screen Baltic and Northern European cinema with Belarusian subtitles, work that filled a real gap at the time. From 2020 onward, when we began running an online competition of Belarusian cinema, our mission shifted. The change in circumstances drove this. The way political and social events unfolded in Belarus both forced and inspired us to create a separate Belarusian programme, and we became, in the fullest sense, a window for Belarusian independent cinema into Europe. We continue to screen Northern European and Baltic cinema online while also presenting Belarusian independent cinema to both audiences. It’s unclear how we’ll develop from here. But we hope to continue uniting these missions.³

SR: In your 2024 manifesto for the festival, you write about identity as fluid and ephemeral. Do you feel that this understanding of identity matters for the festival’s programming strategy and for how you think about Belarusian culture in exile today?

VC: For me, the festival is, in a certain sense, a curatorial project. Meticulous, careful, shaped by hand, assembled into a single concept. I write the festival narratives and produce video essays for it myself now. I write very few poems these days, but once a year, I give myself a difficult technical assignment: to write a poem that will become the manifesto for Northern Lights. And it turns out we don’t really discuss the themes for our festival concepts in advance. I catch what’s in the air and bring it to the team, and it resonates with the team and with the people around us.

And then of course there is identity, which is fluid and ephemeral. You have to rethink and reassemble it under the conditions of migration and exile, when the KGB shows up at your parents’ door (and you have to deal with that somehow), when you have to learn another language and figure out how to sort out your residency paperwork. It’s not at all clear how you preserve your language and culture under such terrible pressure and with no resources. We have always lived at a crossroads. Our fate has always been such that we are constantly being torn into pieces. So Belarusian culture in exile is made up of these pieces, these identities, which everyone assembles into something whole as best they can. That is why it is so hard for us to agree on who we are, how we are, and where we are going.

SR: In 2022, Northern Lights included a Ukrainian section, titled “Ukraine Mon Amour”. What kinds of conversations and reactions did it generate, both among Ukrainian filmmakers and Belarusian audiences?

VC: In the early years, from 2022 on, the Ukrainian films we screened were very strong, and we held online discussions with Ukrainian filmmakers. The decision to include the Ukrainian programme was difficult, of course, but it came from the heart. It was about expressing solidarity and support. The response was good overall, and I am glad that we did it. That said, because of funding difficulties, we screened only two Ukrainian films in 2024. We now find ourselves in a situation where we too need solidarity and support, and we have no real possibility of obtaining funding or rights for Ukrainian films. So I don’t know what will happen with this programme, this summer or going forward. But I am glad we ran it for three years. We had genuinely worthy films and meaningful discussions with Ukrainian filmmakers.

SR: In parallel, you’ve just finished work on your directorial project [Ne stvoranyia dlia palityki] / Not Made for Politics (2025, Estonia/France/USA). Do you see a connection between how you curate the festival programme and your own creative priorities?

VC: For me, Northern Lights is a passion project. As artistic director and founder of the festival, I influence what it looks like. I bring my values and the themes that personally interest me into the programme and into the festival’s image. There is also the question of funding. We don’t have the resources to expand, for example, the programming team of selectors, and there are no large agencies handling the creative design of the festival. So much of the work has to be done by myself. It is conceptually a one-woman show, though, of course, without the team that has been working with me for so many years, taking on a project of this scale alone would be absolutely impossible.

I have always been interested in women’s leadership, in the presence of women in cinema, and in women’s themes on screen. It isn’t easy. The documentary has more women filmmakers because the entry point is cheaper and simpler. Drama has fewer, because it is expensive, with big budgets and so on. My own directorial debut, originally called The Wife Of, is now coming out under the title Not Made for Politics. It is about women, about struggle, about women’s leadership, about a woman stepping into a man’s place. For me, these are all conversations about the so-called stronger and weaker sex, about women’s capacities in politics, about our Belarusian story, our history. For me, 2020 did not come as a surprise. It became a possibility, an insight, a chance to manifest myself as an author and a director through Not Made for Politics, and finally to find the courage to begin directing.

SR: The platform VODBLISK was launched as an online space for independent Belarusian cinema in a situation where access to such films inside the country had become almost impossible. What were the main dilemmas, technical, ethical, or personal, that you encountered?

VC: Speaking of ethical dilemmas: we cannot show films that might in any way endanger the people involved in them who remain on the territory of Belarus. For example, we never released [Smelastsʹ] / Courage (Aliaksei Paluyan, 2021, Germany) or [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent (Andrei Kutsila, 2021, Poland).⁴ They were in the Northern Lights programme, but of course we did not screen them online. We conduct such screenings only offline for security reasons, which limits us considerably.

The technical dilemma is the question of payment. We used to sell Northern Lights screenings online. From the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, when sanctions began to be imposed on Belarus on a massive scale, that ended. Things had not been working perfectly in 2020 and 2021, but in 2022, we lost the ability to take payment for what we do. That hit us hard. Sanctions technically do not allow payments to go through, and when people start paying from their own accounts, they can attract unwanted attention. So we made the decision to run our screenings for Belarusians online for free.

Unfortunately, commercialising anything connected to Belarusian cinema is extremely difficult. When we launched the platform in Belarus, there was a great deal of interest. We immediately gained Instagram subscribers. There were many views, both inside the country and beyond. There were even purchases. But we were releasing only one film a month, which for an online cinema is simply nothing. We have limited financial and team resources. There are also many films that would generate interest, but that we cannot add for ethical and security reasons. So our catalogue does not grow very fast. And thematically, all the topics and all the genres are rather grim.

Honestly, as someone who has promoted Belarusian cinema (as a journalist, then as a producer, director, and festival organiser), I consider this self-sacrificing labour. All of it is held up by my own enthusiasm. We currently have no funding for VODBLISK. There are no resources to invest in promotion, and as soon as you stop investing in promotion, activity on social media stops too. People simply forget about us. But I understand that Belarusian cinema is such a niche product that even getting people to donate to support it is a tall order.

SR: What do you see as the main difficulty in getting European institutions to engage properly with independent Belarusian cinema in the cultural field today?

VC: As a producer, I will say this: when there are no financial resources, because cinema is expensive, there is no serious attitude toward it. This is a system that operates by its own laws and its own rules and demands certain accountability.

For Belarus to officially become a country eligible to receive money for its projects, you have to start with the political question. Belarus would have to become a member of the Council of Europe, and Belarus cannot become a member of the Council of Europe because we have major problems with human rights, among other things. We are not Ukraine, which has been striving toward entry into the European Union for many years. We are Belarus, which, under the current authorities, has never been given any hope of becoming a partner country in the common European space. That is simply the situation.

So Belarus cannot enter the European cultural field. We can only come and ask for money for our difficult subjects. We can shout, we can ask for the mechanisms to shift, we can explain our complicated situation. We can explain how filmmakers in exile work and how difficult it is. But we cannot influence the mechanisms of the European Union, which were developed by democratic countries, so that everything works clearly and equally for everyone. Filmmakers living in exile in Europe who work on films connected to Belarus try to integrate, learn the language, and sort out the paperwork required to apply for national and local funds with their projects, which may or may not be connected to Belarusian themes.

The political situation in Belarus is the main difficulty. We are looked at exclusively through the prism of politics. So it is a trap. I speak about this as an artist. It is hard for me to decide whether I want my art to be political. I have stopped living under the illusion that my film can change the world. My film is one small brick in a larger common struggle. And we have to do it. We have to document everything that is happening and speak out. But sometimes it seems you can get more attention, more interest, and more views if you do not speak only about politics, because society right now is very polarised and very tired of what is happening in the world.

SR: If the situation of exile drags on, how do you see the future role of BIFA and similar initiatives?

VC: We will continue to promote Belarusian cinema. The truth is, there are still many filmmakers who live and work in Belarus. I think this will be our mission. We will be carriers of Belarusian culture and, in some sense, of Belarusian identity, in opposition to the official filmmakers’ union and the official Belarusian film industry, which is pro-Russian.

We will be the engine for progressive Belarusian filmmakers living in Europe, for whom preserving Belarusian cinematic DNA matters. I do not want to say that we will be archivists. But I think we will be community builders. Because it matters to support all these people, Belarusians scattered everywhere, and to keep making cinema together.

And to be a platform, an organisation that brings people together. We will be able to communicate, talk about cinema, support each other, share experiences, and share know-how. A kind of professional union, in a sense. There can be many roles and many tasks for such a community, a bridge between Belarusian independent filmmakers and European and global institutions. We have already established good contacts with them.

SR: Alongside the institutional work, you’ve finished your first feature documentary, Not Made for Politics. What does this film mean at this stage of your life?

VC: I made the film over five years. As a filmmaker, I can say it is not easy. You start a film in one state, mentally, psychologically, and physically, and finish it in an entirely different one. I changed mentally because I saw so many consequences of what our revolution led to, and how we did not win. Plus the war in Ukraine.

I was finishing the film while pregnant. And I gave birth. I was in the studio re-recording the voiceover with a two-month-old at my breast, feeding on demand. So it was very hard. At the same time, there was a thrill in being able to do it. And on the other hand, you curse and think: Why didn’t this film come out two years ago? It could not be done for security reasons and for many other reasons too. Someone was imprisoned; someone had to be blurred; someone was released; something else had to be changed. It is a whole epic.

Making a film about Belarus while meeting all these security requirements, frankly, it is easier to give up. You simply have to blur everyone. But blurring everyone is a privacy issue, which is now being examined and addressed as a topic in documentary cinema. You need a stack of papers from everyone who appears in your frame. If German television is your partner, they will not take the film for screening unless you have consent from everyone, even people just passing through the shot. If not, then blur. Your whole image is ruined. That is what it is like to make cinema about Belarus.

But what drew me to this story, of course, was women’s leadership, women’s manifestation of strength. I was inspired by the fact that women managed to come to an agreement. Three women came to an agreement and made a common decision: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (Sviatlana Tsikhanoŭskaia), Maryia Kalesnikava, Veranika Tsapkala.⁵ Sviatlana’s story inspired me deeply, and so did Masha Kalesnikava’s. These women revealed themselves so completely, out of nothing, out of nowhere. I was struck by their courage and resolve, and by the hopelessness of the situation, in which they did not lose themselves. I wanted to touch this, learn from it, and shout it in the world’s face: look how remarkable we Belarusians are.

SR: Today, many Belarusians work outside the country. Why does one want to make something specifically Belarusian? Does the concept of national cinema (or transnational) remain relevant in this situation?

VC: On this question: in fact, there were highly polarising discussions about national cinema back when I was still working as a journalist, ten or fifteen years ago. And the phrase ‘national cinema’ – on one hand, of course, I understand what is meant by it. There is language, identity, national myth, culture. On the other hand, we don’t, for example, use phrases like national music or national visual art. But for some reason, ‘national cinema’ is a phrase that keeps recurring for us. And I am curious why that is. Where does it come from? Possibly from the time when cinema first appeared, when it was considered a powerful instrument of propaganda. And there are elements of national identity in it. Many things: language, national costumes, certain symbols, certain archetypes, and simply people’s memories of what Belarus is. All of this can be transmitted through cinema. Why not? Especially in exile.

I generally do not like labels. I do not like sticking tags on things, or clichés. Is Belarusian cinema transnational? Well, why not? We can call it transnational because Belarusian filmmakers live all over the world. But it will be very hard for us to fit everything under one tag, because our people are in different countries. Questions of language always come up. Why is Belarusian not heard on screen? If it is not Belarusian, is this cinema national? There is no single right answer.

It seems to me that in the situation we are living through now, the most important thing is that there be any films made by Belarusians at all. This is a very expensive art, and very few features come out. Even at Northern Lights, in our Belarusian competition, more than ninety per cent of what gets submitted is short form: student work, shorts. So preserving anything at all is very difficult. The label ‘national’ only makes sense within the geographic borders of our country. And we are not even within those borders anymore. So what is there to talk about?

SR: If not national belonging, then which values and inner principles, in your view, could become the foundation for a future Belarusian cinema?

VC: That is a very personal question. I don’t know. I can only answer about my own values. The thing is, this is a community of authors. Everyone has such different views. Even within BIFA, when we gather and start talking with all the members we currently have, sometimes we cannot develop a single position on basic questions. You simply have to sit down, name values, and vote for the ones that could unite Belarusian cinema.

If I were the one proposing values, I think I would propose freedom. Freedom of creative expression. Respect. Humanism, I think, although I don’t know how dangerous humanism is; it can be interpreted in different ways. Freedom of creative expression is essential. That is the most important value. And equality, perhaps. You could call it that: equality.

It is hard for me to speak about values that could become the foundation for Belarusian cinema in the future. I think in some sense it could be a coming-together, a joining, a community. And people create, with their emotional resources and whatever other resources they have under these circumstances, putting all of it in. Because I do believe that people are gold,⁶ people are the most important thing.

Sasha Razor
University of California Santa Barbara
sasharazor@ucsb.edu

Bio

Volia Chajkouskaya is a Belarusian producer, director, and festival founder, and a voting member of the European Film Academy. She founded the Northern Lights Film Festival in Minsk in 2015 as a platform for Nordic and Baltic cinema in Belarus; after 2020, the festival moved into exile, with independent Belarusian cinema increasingly at its core. She left Belarus for Tallinn in 2018 to study documentary directing and producing at the Baltic Film and Media School, and runs the production company Volia Films, founded in 2016. She is a co-founder of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy (BIFA) and founder of VODBLISK, the festival’s online streaming platform. Her feature directorial debut, Not Made for Politics, a first-person documentary on women’s leadership in the 2020 Belarusian uprising, premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2025.

Sasha Razor is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, United States, specialising in East European and Russophone cinemas. Her research interests include silent film, minor cinemas, digital authoritarianism, and the cinema and visual culture of protest. Razor is a curator, journalist, and co-founder of the Russophone Los Angeles Research Collective. Her current research is on Belarusian cinema after 2020 and its exile and digital circulation.

Filmography

Chajkouskaya, Volia. 2025. [Ne stvoranyia dlia palityki] / Not Made for Politics. Volia Films.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2021. [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent. Belsat TV.

Paluyan, Aliaksei. 2021. [Smelastsʹ] / Courage. Living Pictures Production.

Suggested Citation

Razor, Sasha. 2026. “Through the Prism of Politics: A Conversation with Volia Chajkouskaya on Belarusian Cinema in Exile”. 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.2026.00022.435.

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

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