Eyes Wide Open:

A Conversation with Andrei Kutsila on Documentary Cinema and Exile

Author

Sasha Razor and Volha Isakava

Abstract

Andrei Kutsila (Andrėĭ Kutsila) is a Belarusian documentary director in exile in Poland, whose black-and-white [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent (2021), following several families living with the trauma of imprisonment after the 2020 crackdown, won Best Documentary at the Warsaw Film Festival. In conversation with Sasha Razor and Volha Isakava, he revisits his praxis, from his early independent films through his years at the channel Belsat to the ethics of filming people who cannot be named, and remains uncertain about the future of Belarusian cinema in exile.

Keywords

Andrei Kutsila (Andrėĭ Kutsila); Belarusian cinema; documentary film; exile; Belsat; 2020 Belarusian protests; political repression; observational cinema; national cinema

running title: A Conversation with Andrei Kutsila

Somewhere on an encrypted disk that Andrei Kutsila (Andrėĭ Kutsila) can no longer access lies his archive of the 2020 protests: he has forgotten the password, and the footage is sealed inside it as surely as the country it records. It is an apt image for his predicament. A documentarian who built his work on being physically present, breathing the same air as his subjects, Kutsila is now cut off from the territory that gave him his films. The feature documentary that he made about the 2020 crackdown, [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent (2021), won Best Documentary at the Warsaw Film Festival and carried him into exile in Poland; he is now completing Listy / Letters, which turns to animation and the correspondence of political prisoners.

Born in 1983, Kutsila trained first as a journalist at the Belarusian State University and then as a director at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts. He made much of his work through Belsat, the Warsaw-based Belarusian-language channel that, since its launch in 2007, was the one platform allowing independent Belarusian filmmakers to work without state money or censorship. His patient, observational films, including Svaio mestsa / Where You Belong (2015), Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War (2018), Suma / Summa (2018), and the black-and-white Sviataia vada / Holy Water (2023), earned selections at the Krakow, IDFA, and Warsaw film festivals. When the 2020 uprising reached his own family and his sister was arrested, he turned the camera to the women left waiting outside the prison walls. He has been based in Poland since 2021 and is a co-founder of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy.

The conversation that follows, conducted with Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor, takes up a claim Kutsila makes plainly: that he had his eyes open to the Lukashenka regime from the start and that 2020 brought him no revelations. It traces the impossible conditions of independent filmmaking before that year, the role of Belsat, the ethics of filming people who cannot be named, and his reasons for returning, again and again, to black and white. And it presses the question that shadows the whole exchange: whether a cinema severed from its own country can remain a national cinema at all, or whether the films that matter most must still be made, even anonymously, from within.

Sasha Razor (SR) and Volha Isakava (VI): You trained as a journalist before coming to documentary film. What led you in this direction?

Andrei Kutsila (AK): As teenagers, my friends and I made films – not documentaries but amateur fiction. VHS cameras had only just appeared, and a friend’s mother owned one. We wrote scripts and played around. Sadly, none of the films survive; it would be interesting to watch them now.

It became serious at the Faculty of Journalism at the Belarusian State University, where I completed my degree in 2007. I started helping friends shoot stories as a cameraman, and I realised that what captivated me was telling things through images rather than words. Later, we set up a video studio on the university campus. We got an internal grant, ostensibly for student news, but it gave us all the equipment we needed to make something of our own.

An invitation arrived at the university to take part in some youth film festival in Moscow, something vague, to do with universal human values. It took me to the Zhyrovichy Monastery,¹ where I met the monk Aleh Bembel (Aleh Bembel’), a poet and Soviet-era dissident, son of the noted sculptor Andrei Bembel (Andrėĭ Bembel’).² I became friends with my subject, and a classmate and I began travelling out to him to develop a biographical film. We followed the standard television approach: interviews, archival footage, location inserts, an actor’s voiceover, and a chronological account from childhood to the present with all its turns. It was our first attempt at a serious documentary, but we still knew little about the world of documentary film; we took it for a slightly deeper kind of television journalism.

Then I began reading about cinema. I caught screenings of short Belarusfilm documentaries at the Tsentralny and Raketa cinemas, including films by Viktar Asliuk, Halina Adamovich, and others.³ I was hungry for auteur cinema. Television did not show it, except now and then at odd hours on the state channel. I hunted it down in cinemas’ special programmes and copied it onto DVD. That is how it began.

That first film, Paėma very / Poem of Faith (Andrei Kutsila, 2007, Belarus), took me to screenings in the Russian town of Borovsk.⁴ In the local house of culture, there was an old man’s photographic darkroom. Huge portraits of a young woman hung on the walls, a metre and a half by a metre. She turned out to be his daughter, with whom he had lost contact, and he hand-tinted his black-and-white photographs in colour. The picture and the story moved me, and the idea of restoring colour to a distant past lodged itself in me. I sensed a drama without knowing its origin, and felt I could tell this man’s story through the language of cinema. A couple of months later, I tracked down the telephone number of that house of culture and went back to Russia, this time with a friend and co-author. We had no car then; we hauled all the equipment ourselves on our shoulders, on our backs, on minibuses, and on trains. The lights alone weighed a great deal. The old man had suitcases of audio recordings of his daughter from her childhood. He and his wife, it emerged, had separated, and all that he had left were his daughter’s negatives and the recordings of their meetings. That was the first time we reached more deeply into a person’s life.⁵

The film was selected for the Krakow Film Festival.⁶ We went, met seasoned directors, watched films, and saw how wide this world was and how many possibilities it held. That settled it: this was more interesting than journalism, which never let you linger on a single subject or protagonist. I took evening courses at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts and graduated in 2009, in a specialisation actually titled “director of video films.” Not “film director,” not “director of films”, but video films. I never understood why they put it that way.

I attended international workshops – IDFAcademy, Berlinale Talents.⁷ I watched and read a great deal, alongside short trips for professional training. That is how I gradually entered the industry and world of cinema.

SR and VI: How would you describe the conditions for independent filmmakers in Belarus before 2020? What role did Belsat play?

AK: The conditions were dire because everyone worked against the grain. There were very few of us documentary filmmakers to begin with. You could count on one hand those who spent years trying to stay in the profession and make films about Belarus and Belarusians, rather than making one film by chance and vanishing.

Dire above all because it was almost impossible to realise a project of your own and have state funding for it. There are good exceptions, of course, including Volha Dashuk (Vol′ha Dashuk), Viktar Asliuk, Halina Adamovich, and a few others who managed to work on their own subjects, but only until the Ministry of Culture began imposing its list of approved themes.⁸ Earlier, according to older colleagues, you could submit a one-page application and make a film free of ideology. Those days were ending in the mid-2000s. The strong documentaries, mostly shorts, were made in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Independent documentary was never tied to the state. Three things defined the landscape. First, you could not get money if you came up with an idea of your own. Second, there was censorship, and no state film institute to support projects, whether fiction, documentary, or animation. Third, there were no private funds. The only sources of financing were Belsat or international funds.⁹ But the international funds mostly wanted a sociopolitical angle, such as the films of Yuri Khashchevatsky (Iury Khashchavatski) and Viktar Dashuk (Viktar Dashuk), for instance.¹⁰ The best-known Belarusian documentarians abroad are those whose films reached major international festivals and television, such as the French, German, Finnish, Polish, and other festivals and broadcasts. What else could mark success inside the country, where there was no real distribution and no airtime for new documentaries? Nothing.

For many years, Belsat let me and other directors stay in the profession, free of the pressure of the state studio and television, free of censorship. You came to an editor with your own subject, and you were rarely asked to take on someone else’s. The theme could have nothing to do with the news agenda, and you could spend six months to a year shooting. The budgets were tiny, but within Belarus and with a small crew, they were enough to make films that interested not only Belarusians but foreign audiences, as festival selections and screenings confirmed. That reinforced our sense that we were following our own path, and that it was the right one.

SR and VI: In 2018, Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War (Andrei Kutsila, 2019, Belarus) was pulled from the programme of Listapad, and after a FIPRESCI protest, the film was reinstated. How did you interpret that episode then, and has your reading changed?

AK: I had run into censorship, which was not even political, earlier at Belarusfilm, when I came with my own project. I had been chosen as one of the directors of 15 stāsti par jauno / 15 Young by Young, a Latvian-French anthology.¹¹ Each director picked a subject and, through it, spoke about the young generation in their country. I went to Belarusfilm to propose a collaboration, since we already had partners, with the French channel Arte and a Latvian producer.¹² We shot in Belarus and did post-production in Paris.

My protagonist was a young athlete who had grown up in a boarding home and had an unhappy childhood, but who, through judo and a coach he could lean on in every sense, managed to adapt to the institution and choose his own path. Sport was his road to a better life.

After we finished post-production in France, Belarusfilm convened an artistic board, an acceptance review that in principle had nothing to do with politics. But the studio’s director at the time, Aleh Silvanovich (Aleh Silʹvanovich), decided that one scene demeaned the protagonist or left him exposed, even though the protagonist himself fully accepted the film, including a scene that quotes from his personal file at the institution. We had to cut a few passages for the Belarusfilm version, though they served no artistic or social purpose, and the protagonist himself had already consented to everything in the film. It was pure systemic incomprehension. You arrive with your own work, you bring in foreign partners, and the Belarusfilm cut ends up on the shelf anyway. The full version was included in the anthology and screened on Arte.

As for Listapad, that was the Ministry of Culture interfering in the work of the festival’s independent selection committee.¹³ Under Irina Driga’s (Iryna Dryha) leadership, films already chosen for the national competition were filtered out. They pulled not only mine but Alexander Mihalkovich’s (Aliaksandr Mikhalkovich) Maia babulia z Marsa / My Granny from Mars (Alexander Mihalkovich, 2018, Belarus), about a grandmother in Crimea, because it touched a political subject; a film by Andrei Kudinenko (Andrėĭ Kudzinenka), I believe, was censored as well.¹⁴ In protest, some directors withdrew their films – the first, as I recall, was Katsiaryna Makhava, for which I am grateful to her, and others followed her out of solidarity. But most authors did not, and a bitter aftertaste remained. I had long forgotten about it, though your question brings it back. I hope – I can even see – that since 2020, our independent film community has matured. Today, we support one another with more solidarity than we did then. At least that’s what I want to believe. The following year, in 2019, when Listapad asked for my film back, and the Ministry’s commission no longer interfered, I returned it on the condition that Katsiaryna Makhava’s film and all the others also be shown. And so it was, which felt like real progress for us all. At that 2019 edition, the last before the pandemic, two of my films made the competition; Suma / Summa (Andrei Kutsila, 2018, Belarus) won the national prize, and Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War took the jury prize in the international section.¹⁵ There was a certain joy in it, but no euphoria, no illusion that a real thaw had begun.

I never had many illusions about the regime. As students, in 2006, we were already going out to the protests.¹⁶ In 2010, it all happened again.¹⁷ In my circle, we did not live with our eyes shut. Many people’s eyes opened only in 2020 – still, at least they opened. I had been living in that country for fourteen, maybe twenty years, reading the papers back before the internet. For me, this was no revelation.

You cannot raise money for independent cinema in Belarus, and you cannot always show a film in public, but I was at least glad that even in those conditions, you could work more or less undisturbed – that you could at least shoot. You had to work without accreditation, without the official permits where they were required, but you could realise your own projects inside the country, which, for a documentarian, matters almost more than financing. An independent director could not get everywhere by any means, yet films were made in those conditions, and a new wave of directors appeared. We were all in touch, all talking. Listapad was, if not the centre, then one of the places where, once a year, you could meet, see fresh independent Belarusian films, and discuss them. It nourished our development and the beginnings of an independent industry. It should also be said that many of those doing worthwhile work in Belarus trained outside it – at the Wajda School in Warsaw, say, or at various workshops – and went on Gaude Polonia scholarships.¹⁸ Earlier, you could still go to workshops in Russia, but before long, we all stopped going.¹⁹

SR and VI: Your earlier films were observational and kept their distance from direct political statements. What changed in 2020?

AK: Political films had appeared before; they just were not widely known. After 2010, we made Davoli! Davoli! / Enough! Enough! (Andrei Kutsila, 2012, Belarus), a more televisual film, a kaleidoscope of people who had lived through the 2010 post-election crackdown.²⁰ Some had served time, some had been released; back then, people were let out quickly.²¹ That was 2012, eight years before 2020. Earlier, there was the cycle Stsiana / The Wall, which featured short interviews with people who had served time for criminal charges and were freed within months, among them well-known figures. We made films about Statkevich (Mikalaĭ Statkevich),²² and about Sannikau (Andrėĭ Sannikaŭ)²³ while he was still imprisoned – his mother appears in that one.

It was a turbulent couple of years when we tried to make sense of 2010, but it was more journalistic than full-fledged observational cinema. Kakhanne pa-belarusku / Love in Belarusian Style (Andrei Kutsila, 2014, Belarus) was likewise closer to reportage, on the border with a film, about Nasta Dashkevich (Nasta Dashkevich), who waited for her husband as his sentences kept being extended.²⁴ I had already been through the political period and had grown a little tired of that kind of work. Everything that could be said in that register had been said by me and by the people I worked with then. Around 2013 and 2014, I returned to the pure observational form I had always loved.

At the start of 2020, I was already working on another project, but I set it aside. First, I made the short Stseny / Walls (Andrei Kutsila, 2020, Belarus), about people waiting for their relatives outside the Akrestsina detention centre.²⁵ Then my sister was arrested; her car was shot at, and she and her husband ended up behind bars. I watched the videos on TUT.BY, which was covering it heavily, and realised it was time to make this kind of film.²⁶ Over several months, I filmed several women. The film took shape on its own; I simply began recording what was happening around me, and only later did I understand it would be a film about women with my sister at its centre. Not with observational cinema in the pure sense, but a strong dose of it. The work took a year. There were no difficult choices to make; it all came naturally.

I went abroad to edit and finish in peace. Before the premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival, I knew.²⁷ A year after the protests, in 2021, with the film coming out, I understood I would leave the country. Like everyone, I thought I would be gone for a couple of months – in my case, for an internship at the film school in Łódź, for a year at most.²⁸ During that internship, it became clear that returning to Belarus any time soon would be impossible.

SR and VI: How did you manage to get the footage you had shot out of the country?

AK: I uploaded some of it to cloud storage, and I carried some out on encrypted disks. I recently forgot the password, and all my archival material from the protests is locked inside. Even if it had been inspected, it could not have been opened. Under torture, anything can be “opened,” but God forbid this kind of scenario. At the time, this method seemed entirely safe.

SR and VI: Tell us about the logistical and ethical challenges you face today, taking private prison correspondence and underground footage out of Belarus.

AK: With the experience of that first project, and from what I had seen around me, our rule became this: if a person is safe or leaving, you can show them and name them; if a person is inside the country, you keep them anonymous and generalise the figure, so that they could be any one of a thousand people. On this new project, almost everyone is abroad.²⁹ We waited nearly two years, for instance, for one protagonist to be released from prison and leave the country.

SR and VI: Sviataia vada / Holy Water (Andrei Kutsila, 2023, Belarus) was shot in Kyiv shortly before February 2022. What did you feel there?

AK: What the film conveys.³⁰ As I drove through the city, past military installations, I saw many soldiers and certain activity on the ground. You could feel it in the air, though people still did not believe it. But that’s not what I had come to film; I had come to film Theophany, which I had planned to shoot in Belarus.³¹ Every year, I watched the ritual near my home in Minsk, thinking about how best to do it, and I watched the OMON that supposedly kept order during the feast. I realised that even here, at a religious holiday, I would run into trouble if I showed up with professional gear. At the entrance to the church grounds, where the large open-air baptismal font stands, everyone is searched.³² So I had been nursing the subject for years, and circumstances in Kyiv reshaped it.

After a few days in Ukraine, I realised that I, too, did not really believe Russia would launch a full-scale war and march on Kyiv. Almost no one did. While I was filming Theophany in a residential district of the capital, I would start talking with people; once they got used to the camera and microphones, I would step aside, and the conversation continued without me. At the same time, we filmed people, naked or half-naked, lowering themselves into the icy water. By the end of that day, we had a body of observational footage of ordinary Kyivans, and in almost every group, the possibility of war lay right at the surface. Those unclothed bodies created an image of both human fragility and of courage, so that by the time the film came out, the context of war was already shaping how the viewer experienced the film, without any need to show fighting directly. The idea grew and deepened that way.

This is the strength of documentary film. You are not always in control; you have to adapt, to be ready for the surprises of reality, and to accept them rather than push them away. You can arrive with your concept and shoot only what you intended. But sometimes real life turns out stronger and more expressive than the director himself. That is the advantage of documentary over fiction, where you must plan almost everything down to the last detail. Reality nearly always brings you something fresh, something you did not expect – you only have to stay open to it.

SR and VI: Why do you shoot some of your documentaries in black and white?

AK: Three films are in a muted register – Where You Belong (Andrei Kutsila, 2015, Belarus), shot in the Shchuchyn district; When Flowers Are Not Silent (Andrei Kutsila, 2021, Poland); and Holy Water.³³

It is different and intuitive each time. Even within a single day of shooting, you arrive not expecting black and white, and then you see that there is too much clutter. In Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ, the wallpaper in the apartments, for instance, was too loud; it pulled attention away from what mattered. And the film is largely about the women’s faces, where everything is written. At the same time, it gestured more faintly towards the repressions of the 1930s and 1940s.³⁴ There is always something intuitive about it; you see the colour, you see the black and white, and you sense what the film needs to be.

It is usually very hard, by the way, to persuade a television editor that a film should be black and white, especially in a reportage slot in the broadcast schedule. Sviataia vada was commissioned as reportage. But within a reportage commission, I was allowed to treat my subjects in the language of cinema, or on the border between cinema and television; that creative freedom was the great advantage of working with Belsat.

SR and VI: In Listy / Letters (Andrei Kutsila, forthcoming), you turn to animation, archival footage, and political prisoners’ correspondence. How did you arrive at this form?

AK: Quite simply, this happened because one of the women made drawings in prison.³⁵ That was our point of departure. I wanted to convey her feelings, her inner world, the emotions in the drawings. The drawings vary greatly; you can see them change from her first days in prison to her last in the penal colony with a shift in approach and in colour. They are a record of her journey. We made a deliberate choice: a single visual style, drawn from her own work, held across this whole section of the film, within which you can see the drawings change. It is not finished yet; we are still in the middle of it, and I do not yet know how it will fit in the project as a whole.

Animation is the most expensive part, as if the budgets of several earlier films of mine had all gone into animation alone. I never had that chance before, but I always wanted to enter this territory, which is new to me: to create differently, to build the film’s visual fabric. It is not that animation is stronger than documentary footage – not at all. It is simply different.

SR and VI: What is BIFA, what is its purpose, how did you come to be involved with it, and what does the organisation make possible that was not possible before?

AK: I was on a fellowship in Berlin developing my current project when I met like-minded Belarusians who proposed I become one of the founders.³⁶ It began with online meetings. The idea crystallised after Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began.³⁷ We saw that, as a film community, we needed solidarity – or we would simply be lumped in with Russia unless we spoke with one voice and presented a united front. Our separate voices would not be heard; we would be equated with the Russian directors who stay silent or speak very cautiously.

So we decided to unite those voices, which was essential. More than 130 Belarusian filmmakers signed the open letter condemning the war against Ukraine, which was inspiring. We were heard, we were written about, and this was not a position taken for show but one we genuinely held. I think it worked and is still working, despite all the obstacles, because without stable funding, it is hard to operate at a high level. But the foundation has been laid. Projects were launched and presented at the European Film Market during the Berlinale, and industry people saw the Belarusians’ potential. These authors now receive funding from the Polish Film Institute and other funds.³⁸ No one claims sole credit for the trend, but as an academy, we added our share.

That is healthy. We were invited onto panels and tried to lobby for the film community’s interests. It is an important step on our part: we can unite, and we can be heard.

Because I had no time, I have since stepped off the board to concentrate on my own project and make room for fresh faces who can bring something new to the academy’s work.

SR and VI: In earlier interviews, you have said that Belarus is living through a national tragedy. What can documentary cinema do in these conditions, and what do you want people outside Belarus to understand?

AK: Documentarians can stay in the profession and do their work. I have nothing new to add to that.

I feel it through the Ukrainian context, too. The Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival in Warsaw has just ended, and far fewer people go to Ukrainian films now, and to Belarusian films, fewer still.³⁹ People are tired of the subject of Ukraine. Even the Ukrainians – already in their millions in Poland, hundreds of thousands in Warsaw – turn up less. The audience now is more the industry, Poles, those already interested. The same thing happened with the wave of documentaries about our own 2020. Now we have to go further and find new ways to make sure we are remembered and that people keep engaging with us.

I put it down to the fact that Belarusians themselves do not go to such films, because they are afraid of being retraumatised, so the work is aimed more at an outside audience. Now that we know everything about ourselves, about the political prisoners, about the present situation, it is worth reminding the international community what is happening to us right now: not what happened in 2020 and 2021, but what Belarusian society is living through today, inside the country and in exile. What matters most is what happens inside, to the people in Belarus itself. We can look for cinematic methods and forms to speak about today’s Belarus through artistic means. The more varied and genuinely appealing such cinema is – even when the subject is heavy – the better. We have to draw in the outside viewer, the one beyond our context, and do it at the highest artistic level. Then perhaps people will come not only for the subject but for the way it is made.

And isn’t there a danger of the same thing happening elsewhere – in Europe, say, in a few years? We have to make the subject more universal; many people around the world live through what Belarusians do. Each case is its own drama, its own story, but together they are universal. We are all human, and with the right artistic means, we can return Belarus to the political agenda, if only in this way. I do not see it as a mission or an obligation we are bound to fulfil as documentarians. It is simply the natural work of a director, especially a documentarian. There is nothing contentious about it.

SR and VI: And how do you see the future of Belarusian cinema in exile?

AK: A vast question, and no one knows. In the end, do we not all dissolve into the context of the country we live in? Yet there are directors – Syrian, Iranian, and others – who leave and carry a subject bound to their homeland for the rest of their lives. That is neither good nor bad. But can such films, made by émigré directors with other countries’ money, count as Belarusian cinema in the full sense? The answer, perhaps, is simply: thank God they appear at all. The more pertinent question is whether the authors forced to leave Belarus will stay in the profession. I do not know whether I will stay in it myself, whether there will be another project, whether financing will be found for yet another Belarusian subject, whether new subjects will even come to you when you are physically cut off from the country, from your potential protagonists, when you cannot breathe that air. You can invent artistic forms for working in such conditions, of course, but they are not inexhaustible. And how interesting will it be, above all, to you as an author?

The point is not what Belarusian cinema will look like, but that films and authors must keep arising inside the country, even in those conditions. They may be anonymous, but they will know what is happening from within better than we do. We can obtain materials, keep our contacts, but even so, it will gradually become an outsider’s view. I scarcely believe that in twenty years we will all still be here making films on Belarusian subjects, and that they will still be relevant and in demand.

Ideally, you return to your country. If you cannot return permanently, then you have the chance to travel there and make films. Today, that sounds almost like a fantasy, but it is all possible. Many nations have been through it. In Poland too, the émigrés returned, and the cinema revived; the Polish documentary school today is one of the best in the world.⁴⁰ We have not yet passed through that stage, but with our experience scattered across other countries, and with what we have lived through and learned, we could build our own film industry at home. If the Belarusian Independent Film Academy were already operating inside the country, say, and a film school were set up there, I guarantee you there would be a powerful surge of cinema. A time of transformation is the most interesting moment of all for a documentarian. When it comes, new names, subjects, films, and an industry of our own will be waiting.

It can all turn out in different ways. We live here and now. For now, there are names, and there are films arising both inside the country – still isolated cases of independent cinema – and abroad. Films about Belarus are being made, and Belarusians are making them themselves. All is not yet lost.

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

Volha Isakava
Central Washington University
Volha.Isakava@cwu.edu

Bio

Andrei Kutsila is a Belarusian documentary director living in exile in Poland. Trained as a journalist at the Belarusian State University and as a director at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts, he made much of his work through the Belarusian-language channel Belsat. His films include Suma / Summa (2018), Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War (2018), Sviataia vada / Holy Water (2023), and the feature [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent (2021), which won Best Documentary at the Warsaw Film Festival. A co-founder of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy, he is completing Listy / Letters, a feature documentary combining animation, archival footage, and political prisoners’ correspondence.

Filmography

Kutsila, Andrei. 2007. Paėma very / Poem of Faith.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2008. Fokusnaia adlehlastsʹ / Focal Distance.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2012. Davoli! Davoli! / Enough! Enough!. Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2014. Kakhanne pa-belarusku / Love in Belarusian Style. Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2015. Svaio mestsa / Where You Belong. Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2018. Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War. Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2018. Suma / Summa. Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2020. Stseny / Walls. Belsat TV.

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

Kutsila, Andrei. 2023. Sviataia vada / Holy Water. Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. Forthcoming. Listy / Letters.

Suggested Citation

Razor, Sasha and Volha Isakava. 2026. “Eyes Wide Open: A Conversation with Andrei Kutsila on Documentary Cinema and 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.2026.00022.445.

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

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This licence does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner’s terms.