Belarusian Documentary Captures Hope Amid State Repression

Andrei Kutsila left Belarus because staying meant risking arrest. Like hundreds of thousands of his countrymen—somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000—he had become a liability to the state simply by making films about what the state was doing. While he was finishing his previous documentary about the brutal suppression of the 2020 protests, colleagues around him were being taken into custody. Some were eventually released, but the cells never emptied. New prisoners arrived to fill them. The repression, he tells anyone who will listen, has only intensified since those early days when Belarusians poured into the streets hoping to end Alexander Lukashenko's rule.

What began as a moment of possibility in 2020 has calcified into something far grimmer. The human rights organization Viasna has documented at least 65,000 politically motivated arrests and detentions in the years since those protests. The machinery of control has become so efficient, so pervasive, that dissent itself has nearly vanished from public view. The streets are quiet now. People speak in whispers. Someone can be arrested and imprisoned simply for posting a Belarusian symbol of freedom online—a digital transgression that carries real consequences in cells.

Kutsila could not return to Belarus to film. The risk was too great, and the subjects he needed to reach were either imprisoned or in hiding. Instead, he found another way in. He began reading letters—thousands of them—written by prisoners to friends and family on the outside, and by those on the outside writing back to those locked away. From this vast archive of correspondence, he constructed a documentary called "Letters from the Silenced Country," which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026. The film, co-produced with Deutsche Welle, uses these letters as a window into a country that has been systematically silenced.

One of the film's central figures is Vitold Ashurak, an opposition activist and environmental campaigner who was sentenced to five years in prison for participating in the 2020 protests. Through his letters and the photographs his friends sent him—carefully chosen images that offered him brief mental escape from his cell—the film traces his experience of captivity. But the documentary does not allow viewers to remain in that private correspondence. It cuts to CCTV footage of prison guards beating inmates, forcing a confrontation with the physical reality behind the words. Ashurak died in custody under circumstances that remain suspicious. His name has become shorthand for the state's capacity for violence.

Another voice in the film belongs to Kasia Budzko, a young student sentenced to two and a half years in prison for protesting. Her story is told through animated sequences based on her own drawings. There is also Andrei Ostapovich, a former criminal investigator who, in August 2020, walked away from his job and wrote a resignation letter denouncing police brutality against demonstrators. As one of the first security officials to publicly oppose the regime, he became a target. He fled the country through a series of dangerous detours, eventually reaching safety abroad.

When asked in the film whether he still believes in a free Belarus after everything he has witnessed, Ostapovich hesitates for a long moment. His answer is a sigh. Kutsila recognizes this ambivalence in himself. He is not immune to the weight of what he has documented—the scale of arrest, the persistence of surveillance, the way hope can feel like a luxury in a country where speaking freely has become an act of defiance. Yet he resists the pull toward despair. He points to history as a foundation. Two centuries ago, Belarus did not even appear on maps. The struggle for its existence has been long and uneven, but it has continued. From that longer view, he says, there is reason to hope.

What sustains that hope, according to Kutsila, is not a political calculation or a prediction about when things might change. It is something more elemental: solidarity between people, connection, love. These are the threads he tried to weave through his film—not as sentiment, but as evidence of what persists even when the state has done everything in its power to break it. The letters themselves are proof. People writing to prisoners. Prisoners writing back. A country speaking to itself in whispers, refusing to be entirely silenced.