Seemingly at Home, Seemingly Not:

A Conversation with Aliaksei Paluyan on Documentary, Fiction, and the Belarusian Story

Author

Sasha Razor

Abstract

Aliaksei Paluyan (Aliakseĭ Paluian) is a Belarusian director trained in Kassel. His documentary [Smelastsʹ] / Courage (2021, Germany / Belarus) was the first film about the 2020 Belarusian protests to premiere at the Berlinale. In this conversation, he reflects on how to sustain a national cinema from exile. Paluyan works in the German film industry, but his films are about Belarus. This split raises the central question of his career: how long can a director call himself Belarusian once citizenship, funding, and the possibility of return have all shifted? He also discusses observation as a method that connects documentary and fiction, the dramaturgical role he gives the Belarusian language, and the institutional work of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy.

Keywords

Aliaksei Paluyan (Aliakseĭ Paluian); Belarusian cinema; Belarusian language; Belarusian Independent Film Academy; post-2020 protests; exile and emigration; national identity; observation; transnational film production; Courage

In September 2012, a computer-engineering graduate from Minsk arrived in the German city of Kassel on a Rotary exchange scholarship and spent his first morning lost in a concrete building he took for Stasi headquarters, hunting for the film academy. Aliaksei Paluyan (Aliakseĭ Paluian) stayed eight years, and the director who emerged has become one of the most internationally visible figures of post-2020 Belarusian cinema. His documentary [Smelastsʹ] / Courage (2021, Germany / Belarus), about three actors of the Belarus Free Theatre (Belaruski Svabodny Tėatr) during the uprising, was the first Belarusian film about the 2020 uprising to premiere at the Berlinale; his fiction feature Spadchyna / Legacy is in production (forthcoming, Germany), and his fiction project Inkubatar / Incubator (forthcoming, Germany), which binds Belarusian repression to the war in Ukraine, took a Gold Rush Pictures award at Berlinale Talents Lab in 2026. Financed in Germany and shot in Belarus, his films can no longer carry him home: after Courage, his name reportedly sits on a KGB watch list.

Born in 1989 in Baranavichy, in the Brest Region of western Belarus, Paluyan trained as a software engineer before the scholarship took him to the Kunsthochschule Kassel, where he studied film directing from 2012 to 2020. He works across documentary and fiction, drawn in both to the texture of lived experience: his short Kraĭ zhanchyn / Country of Women (2017, Germany / Belarus) and his short fiction debut Vozera radastsi / Lake of Happiness (2019, Belarus / Germany / Spain) grew out of close observation in the villages of his childhood. A co-owner of the Berlin-based company Living Pictures Production and a co-founder of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy, which since 2023 has pitched Belarusian projects to the European industry at the Berlinale, he took German citizenship in the 2020s while continuing to work almost entirely with Belarusian subjects.

The conversation that follows, which combines an exchange in Kassel in 2022 with a video call between Los Angeles and Berlin in 2026, takes up the question that shadows a double life: how a director holds on to a national identity once citizenship, financing, and home have all shifted. It traces his understanding of authenticity and observation as method, the dramaturgical weight he gives the Belarusian language, and his sense of what untold Belarusian stories might offer a world only beginning to recognise them. And it foregrounds the question he keeps returning to – whether, working between two countries, he can still call himself a Belarusian director, and for how long.

SR: You studied to be a software engineer in Minsk and could have become an IT specialist, but in 2012 you moved to Kassel. Why did you decide to change profession and train as a director in Germany?

AP: I was always drawn to a creative profession, and cinema interested me more than theatre – I understood it better. Then, quite by chance, I came across an advertisement for a Rotary Club exchange scholarship. As it happened, it led to Kassel and to film. This was the end of September 2012. I arrived late in the evening and saw almost nothing of the city. The next day, I set out to find the art academy.¹ I had imagined that an academy of arts would be a large, beautiful building with columns – if not rococo, then Renaissance. After an hour of wandering, I ended up in something that looked like Stasi headquarters: 1950s concrete and asbestos, empty, not a soul around. As I wandered through this block, I finally ran into a professor of ceramics. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “Cinema,” I said. “There are two film departments here, left and right. Which one do you need?” “Professor Yana Druz.” “Ah – to the left.” That was my first day. No one was there, of course, but I had already made the academy acquaintance.

I was simply lucky to be in the right place with the right people. The Japanese say that a student looks not for a school but for a master. In Yana Druz I found that master.² I will not pretend it was easy – she kept strict discipline. She is someone who has given her whole life to cinema. There was a stretch when we worked from nine in the morning until midnight, and in that intensity you start to see the profession differently: as a way of understanding the world.

Tell us a little about how you studied and how the presence of young directors from different cultures shaped your vision and your directorial strategy.

I studied from 2012 until the beginning of 2020 – almost eight years. The first year was an exchange; then I passed the entrance examination and enrolled as a regular student: of two hundred applicants, twenty were admitted, five of them for film. My fellow students came from Iran, Chile, Afghanistan, Georgia, Russia, and Germany.

It shaped me, of course. You present an idea in a seminar and get feedback from people with very different experiences, and that feedback shapes the idea. At the same time, it tests whether the idea is more than something subjective from inside your own bubble. My Iranian classmates had taken part in the 2010 protests;³ a young Afghan had fled to Germany under threat from the Taliban. Hard, fascinating lives. And it is not only about politics – it is about the gaze, about how you look at a story and at cinema itself.

I went on to make my own projects with most of these people. That international mix meant the stories were tested for how the international audiences would perceive them from the very start, so they would not stay narrowly local. Perhaps that is why my films fare well at international festivals: even as a student, I was learning which subjects speak to audiences in North and South America, in the Arab world.

Our company, Living Pictures Production, where I have been a co-owner since 2020, carries on that tradition.⁴ There are four of us now: a Georgian, an Iranian, myself, and a producer who is half Swedish, half German. The founder, the German producer Jörn Möllenkamp, has moved on.⁵ It is an unusual outfit – three directors and a producer, each with separate ambitions and projects, and yet we cross-pollinate one another’s work. When an Iranian comes to Belarus to shoot my film, it changes the story. When you edit with a Georgian, his experience enters the cut.

When we spoke in 2022, you said you did not feel as though you were in exile, because Germany had already become your home, but that you remained a Belarusian director. How do you feel in 2026?

I recently received German citizenship, which makes some things simpler. But the question of identity remains. For the German industry, I am increasingly German: when my new producers bill me as a “German-Belarusian director” to the industry, I am, in the end, German. Inwardly, I want – and I know this is only my own wish – to feel like a Belarusian director, because I work with Belarusian subjects. At best, you can call yourself that for as long as you keep working with them. If, in a few years, I decide to make a film in Germany on a purely German subject, the question of identity will become even more complicated.

In 2022 I said I did not consider myself a forced émigré: I came here to study of my own free will. But August 2020 – the falsified presidential election and the start of the mass protests against Lukashenka – changed how I saw Germany. It had been a place to study and work, and I had a romantic, naive notion that I would build a bridge between Germany and Belarus through my films. And it worked that way for a while: for Lake of Happiness, a German crew came to a Belarusian village; the film had German financing, and we shot it in Belarus.⁶ Courage, too, was financed by the German Ministry of Culture and shot in Belarus.⁷ After that film I cannot go back – there is a real chance I would be arrested. I have had warnings that I am on some KGB list at the border. And I ask myself: am I in exile? Am I in exile? No – it is not exile. Germany has already become my second home.

The longer I work, the harder the question gets. Four years have changed a great deal – the projects, the producers, my own feelings. In five years, it will be worth speaking again.

Country of Women from 2017 is the least discussed of your documentary films abroad. Tell us about it.

It was student work; I shot it myself, and it came together in a way I never planned. I borrowed a camera from the academy and went to Belarus, to the village near Liakhavichy, where my grandmother was born, where it was easier for me to win the women’s trust.⁸ I just decided to watch, with a camera.

On the first day, I went for a couple of hours and stayed far longer – I even ran out of memory cards, I was so drawn in. Some of the women did not realise I was filming; they thought I was taking photographs. One thing led to another, and I understood I had to keep going, to find new subjects. The next day I went to another woman. Over two or three days, I talked with them all. After I left for Germany, my parents told me that some of the women were actually hurt that I had not come to them – word had gone round the village that Aliaksei was filming.

My position was an easy one: a young man comes to the village to women who are short of attention and of contact with the young. Of course, they want to tell their stories. We met as equals, with a wonderful sense of trust. Only one case was delicate: at a certain point, a woman did not want me to film certain things about her husband, who drank heavily – there were quarrels, violence. I shot those few frames anyway, but when I came to show her the film, I asked, so as not to break her trust, “I filmed a couple of frames there; may I keep them?” She said: “No, it is fine. These are important moments. Leave them in.”

I showed the footage at a seminar, and the international audience responded so strongly to the energy of those elderly women. The melancholy we always talk about in Eastern Europe seemed, for that moment, not to exist – or it was a different melancholy, an oddly positive one. And the vitality that came from them. People laughed so much at the stories. My colleagues’ response gave me such a charge that I cut the film quickly and, while still in the village, began thinking about Lake of Happiness.

Lake of Happiness drew on Martsinovich’s novel, on your father’s years in a children’s home, and on the life of Anastasiya Plats (Anastasiia Pliats), with a real orphan in the lead role.⁹ Where, for you, does the line run between working with lived experience and artistic invention?

For me that line barely exists, because I work in both documentary and fiction. Even in fiction, I look for that same authenticity. Observation helps me here – not so much a method as a mindset.

Lived experience matters enormously; you can feel that authenticity on screen. I work closely with people who have been through something: I talk with them, consult them. If you can see clearly what they offer and fold it into your sense of the project, something quite unexpected and precious can emerge. But it is not easy to see, and finding the right person is no guarantee – you still have to find the form and have the luck for everything to align. To find our lead, we searched for months, travelling around boarding schools. We found her by chance.

How did you work on Courage, and how did you choose the film’s cinematic language?

First, we did not shoot the film only during the protests. We began in 2019, with the German cinematographer Jesse Mazuch.¹⁰ The opening half-hour – the city and the protagonists observed, before any protest – was shot then, when we still had time to look, to search, to build the city in the frame.

For the protest section, we changed cinematographers, which was very risky. Again I was lucky: on a colleague’s advice, I found a wonderful Belarusian documentarian, Tatsiana (Tania) Haurylchyk (Tatsiana Haŭryl’chyk).¹¹ She is enormously experienced, and we barely discussed visual language – there was no time. I had sent her the first edited reel in advance, the opening 40 minutes, and she caught the rhythm already built into it. When you shoot in such extreme conditions, it is hard to think about visual language at all. What we had was a fairly simple Black Magic camera and Tania’s professionalism. We searched for the shots together; we were observing together.

Then there was the editing, which I did with my colleague Behrooz Karamizade.¹² We worked on the film’s rhythm so that the opening, shot in advance, would flow into the protest section, and so the viewer could breathe and begin to reflect after the harshest moments. The breathing room is the protagonists’ daily life – talking through their fears, the news, their plans for the future. We thought all of that through.

Tania was detained only later. We had shot and even edited and colour-graded the film, and sent it to the Berlinale, when, a day afterwards, Raman Bandarenka (Raman Bandarėnka) was killed.¹³ Tania went out to the memorial march, and that is when she was detained. But more than 1,200 people were arrested in Minsk that day – there was simply no room for her in jail, and they sent her home after a couple of hours.

How do you work with formal means in documentary and fiction, and where does your visual language come from?

I think it comes from everything I have watched – the directors and films that moved me. There is always some inner image to start from. Even as you write a screenplay, you are already imagining how you will shoot it. The screenplay already has a rhythm.

Much depends on the cinematographer. Right now, I am preparing a new Polish project with one of them, and we talk a great deal about how we see particular scenes and which films inspire us. It all layers up. The actors and the lead matter too. On my new film, I knew during the writing whom I wanted in the lead. Some directors print out photographs and pin them to the wall; for me, she lived in my head. When you write, you enter your protagonist’s world and talk with her.

When you discuss a scene with the cinematographer, and you click, they add their own ideas. So much depends on their style – and on the production designer, on how they see the story, on sound, on editing. But choosing a cinematographer is already a statement. I find it easier to work with documentary cinematographers: I know they shoot character, not surface. We are casting now, and I watch how they zoom in on the lead’s face, searching with the camera for what is happening inside her. That is what adds salt and pepper to the dish.

Your fiction debut Legacy (forthcoming), which you are now preparing, is about a father and son on opposite sides of 2020. How did the story come to you, and why a family drama?

The family is a small unit, a metaphor for society – the simplest thing to work with if you want to make a film about society. Six years ago, I wanted to tell the story of an official’s family during the pandemic. Since then everything has shifted. The film we are shooting now is about the moral choice an official and the younger generation face. How far will you go for your values, knowing that your parents helped build the very system you are rising against? Every step you take damages your family. How far are you prepared to go? I was always drawn to the other side of the system – what happens inside an official’s home. I remember the news when the children of the mayor of Vitsebsk were detained.¹⁴ It resonated, and I began to unspool the story. At first, I wrote a version in which the father was the protagonist, but I changed it, because I was told it is easier to speak about your own generation, about what you understand. The perspective shifted; the historical sections fell away. I had thought about the 1980s, but filming that era is expensive and hard. The project has been a stubborn one, and it dragged on with the Warsaw scenes.

The events of the winter of 2020 marked me deeply.¹⁵ My generation changed – much of it left – and you cannot not speak about that. As I worked, certain questions kept burning: What is your home? Where is it? Is home the homeland, or the homeland home? What is the image of home in Belarus? My own reflection on life in emigration fed straight into the film.

Your new fiction project Inkubatar (forthcoming), which has just won the Gold Rush Pictures award at the Berlinale Talents Lab, binds Belarusian repression and the Ukrainian war into a single body – a Belarusian woman, Ukrainian surrogacy, the full-scale invasion.¹⁶ How did these two stories come together for you?

I had wanted to make a film about a Belarusian woman fighting to free her political-prisoner husband. I did not want the trivial, familiar version we have heard many times. I was looking for a form.

I was on the jury at the goEast festival in Wiesbaden in 2022, and over breakfast with Maria Chekhovskaya (Maryia Chakhoŭskaia), the Ukrainian poet Iryna Bondas joined us.¹⁷ We were talking about a report she had just seen on Arte about German couples expecting children through surrogate mothers in Ukraine.¹⁸ And then Maria said: “I have a Ukrainian friend whose mother manages exactly that business.” It fell into place at once – there was the story I had been looking for, and I started writing and got carried away.

I wanted to bind these themes together: the fight for a husband; the question of what motherhood is; how you switch off your emotions when you go into the surrogacy business – if that is even possible. And what happens when you have a plan but find yourself in conditions so extreme that the plan collapses, and you must decide in an instant, facing a moral dilemma. That is what fascinated me.

In which languages do your films speak, and what role does Belarusian play?

The question of language is bound up with authenticity. In Vozera radastsi everyone speaks Belarusian. That was a matter of the period: a village in the 1990s, where you still can believe in Belarusian – though in reality people spoke trasianka.¹⁹

In Spadchyna the question is acute. I know I want Belarusian to be heard in my films, but it has to ring true. My younger generation speaks Belarusian; the older one, the officials, speaks Russian. Much as I would like them all to speak Belarusian, it cannot be done honestly: people who work inside the system do not speak Belarusian, with rare exceptions. So I try to make it as authentic as possible while still wanting Belarusian to be heard in the world.

And I use language as a dramaturgical device. When a character switches tongues, it can signal their transformation. You can work with that. Only Belarusians and Ukrainians will feel these nuances, of course; for the general viewer they will be imperceptible, but they are an interesting layer to work with.

In Kraĭ zhanchyn, the women spoke a wonderful mixture – trasianka, Belarusian, and the dialects of the Liakhavichy district. For Inkubatar, honestly, I have not worked out the details: the story is set in Pinsk, so there will be Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian, and the heroine will speak with her mother in Polesian.²⁰

The idea of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy (BIFA) was born after the war in Ukraine began in 2022, and in February 2023 you, together with Volia Chajkouskaya (Volia Chaĭkoŭskaia), Darya Zhuk (Dar’ia Zhuk), Andrei Kutsila, Igor Soukmanov (Ihar Sukmanaŭ), and Irena Kaciałovič (Irėna Katsialovich), formally launched it at the Berlinale.²¹ What does its work look like now, in its relations with European institutions and in building infrastructure?

I am not the only founder – there was a whole team of enthusiasts. This year, I am preparing to shoot, so I am not very active. The busy phase comes around the Berlin Film Festival, where every year we pitch Belarusian projects at the European Film Market.²² In summer, we work on our own films; closer to winter, a great deal of energy goes into mounting that event and finding the money for it. We all work as volunteers.

In the early years, we were very active. The academy was invited to the monthly Zoom meetings of the European film academies, and we joined the Film Academy Network Europe²³ – Volia Chajkouskaya went to the founding meeting in Luxembourg. I would say the academy is now an organisation that is known, that people come to, and that they trust. It has become a kind of mark of quality for independent Belarusian filmmakers, and it has shifted how they are regarded.

We have good relations with our Ukrainian and German colleagues. At the award ceremony, both the director of the Berlinale and the director of the European Film Academy were present. The European academies know us and support us – good ties, good contacts, good partners. I would not say we are working intensively at the moment; it is all volunteer work, and not everyone has the time.

The European Film Market pitching archive is kept by our manager, Yulia Samoilauskaya (Iuliia Samoĭlaŭskaia). There is even a video of the first presentation, which Tania Haurylchyk filmed. Every year, there is new project material and catalogues.

What have the challenges been over these years?

Above all, finding the money for the pitch. Every year it is a struggle. We are talking about laughable sums, ten to fifteen thousand euros, and still we have to knock on doors and ask, because we are not producers.

The other challenge is logistical: getting decision-makers to the pitch, people who might actually take an interest in the projects. There is already a regular audience that comes every year – 50 or so, give or take – but they are there.

If you think not about the next five years but the next fifty, what do you want Belarusian cinema to become, and what can it offer the world?

I cannot speak for fifty years, but the present interests me. I want to reflect on the lives of people who find themselves in a situation where they are at home and not at home at once. It is not about emigration; it is about a borderline time, a borderline state – not even about geography, but about acceptance, about integrating into a new society and a new time, and about the difficulty of that. Tania Haurylchyk and I talked about this a great deal. Some people still cannot accept it; it takes time. It is about a person’s inner life.

What can we offer world cinema? If we want visibility, authors and directors have to make the world see them. We have a great many fascinating, untold stories. Finding the form to make them global rather than local is very hard – and that is exactly what makes it interesting.

When I talk with German producers, these stories captivate them. I might say, “I want a set dresser on this production who has been in prison.” At first, they do not understand. Then I say, “He knows what a prison corridor looks like”, and they are stunned, because our experience is hard for them to imagine. Or take a translator: we were translating the screenplay into Belarusian, and our translator, Sergei Paŭlavicki (Siarheĭ Paŭlavitski), had only just come out of prison, in December.²⁴ When you translate, you pour in your own meanings and emotions, you search for forms. Foreigners are taken aback by that. The everyday texture of stories that are otherwise hard to imagine – that is what we can offer.

And I do not want to speak only about the strong; the story of the weak is just as worth telling.

Germans absolutely feel the connection between what is happening in Belarus and the broader drift towards authoritarianism worldwide. Spadchyna was supported by the German Ministry of Culture – a fiercely competitive national fund that backs only ten projects in all of Germany, where you compete not just against other newcomers but against Christian Petzold and Wim Wenders.²⁵ Writing my director’s statement, I argued that the film matters not only for Belarus but for all of Europe; people from Iran, Turkey, Syria can feel it too. Europe already understands these processes, and that is a strong argument for Belarusian directors: we know what we are talking about. We only have to find a form striking enough to do it justice.

You have to surprise people. Look for unusual images and unusual forms – strong, compelling stories, yes, but forms that take the audience by surprise.

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

Bio

Aliaksei Paluyan is a Belarusian film director based in Germany. He studied film directing at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and is a co-owner of the production company Living Pictures Production. His documentary Courage (2021), about actors of the Belarus Free Theatre during the 2020 protests, premiered at the Berlinale; it was preceded by the short documentary Country of Women (2017) and the short fiction film Lake of Happiness (2019). A co-founder of the Belarusian Independent Film Academy, he is preparing his fiction feature debut, Legacy, alongside a second drama, Incubator, developed in the 2026 Berlinale Talents Lab, where it received a Gold Rush Pictures Berlinale Talents Lab Award.

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.

Bibliography

Martsinovich, Viktar. 2016. Vozera radastsi (Lake of joy). Translated by Vitalʹ Ryzhkoŭ. Minsk: Knihazbor.

Filmography

Paluyan, Aliaksei. 2017. Kraĭ zhanchyn / Country of Women. Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Paluyan, Aliaksei. 2019. Vozera radastsi / Lake of Happiness. Living Pictures Production.

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

Paluyan, Aliaksei. Forthcoming. Spadchyna / Legacy. Living Pictures Production.

Paluyan, Aliaksei. Forthcoming. Inkubatar / Incubator. Living Pictures Production.

Suggested Citation

Razor, Sasha. 2026. “Seemingly at Home, Seemingly Not: A Conversation with Aliaksei Paluyan on Documentary, Fiction, and the Belarusian Story”. 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.2026.00022.446.

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.