The majority of the films presented are documentaries. Several names familiar to the Belarusian audience are featured, with Victor Aslyuk, a European Film Academy member and the director of The Wheel, Europe’s best short documentary of 2003, among them.
His new film “Epitaph” is presented in this year’s festival program. It is a freestyle poetic essay on the Belarusian burial culture that shows the director’s unique view of the Belarusian nation. The film premiered worldwide at Krakow Film Festival in June 2020.
Another leading Belarusian documentary director featured this year is Andrei Kutsila. His film SUMMA holds the title of the best film of the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and the Best Production award of Krakow Film Festival of 2019.
“I need the handshakes”, the director’s new film, premiered worldwide at Krakow Film Festival in June 2020 and received the jury’s special mention. This is one of the most emotional Belarusian films of recent years, an incredibly beautiful story of limitless sacrifice, the power of imagination, and the poetry potent to help shift the reality.
Daria Yurkevich is a renowned Belarusian-born director, a Le Frenois Academy alumna. Her film “Invisible Paradise” premiered in April 2020 as part of Visions Du Reel competition program. The film illustrates the director’s view of the post-Chernobyl life of a regular Belarusian. The gender and ecological issues, as well as one of the teenagers growing up, are raised.
Director Yulia Shatun, a Moscow School of New Cinema student, is known for the film “Next Day” and her experimental films. “Boundaries” is her new documentary film featured in this year’s festival program. It is a video essay, unique in its form, on issues such as the search of identity, own and someone else’s, personal and artistic, in the rapidly changing world.
“Deserter” is the only fiction film in the 2020 festival program. It is originally a diploma project of a FAMU School (Prague, Czech Republic) alumnus Sasha Stelchenko. “Deserter” is an anti-war dramatical story of a difficult choice and the father-son relationship, filmed in Ukraine. The film took part in several international film festivals, the prestigious Palm Springs Festival in California, US, among them.
The topics of the war, the trauma, and the relationships in the family arise again in Marta-Dariya Klimava’s debut documentary film “My father”. It is a touching story of a girl looking for her father who died at war and recollecting the memories of his life. The film was mass screened in Ukraine.
“Way Home” is the cinematic debut of the successful Belarusian clip maker Artsiom Lobach. The protagonist is a young pottery artist who is forced to abandon his house in Crimea and relocate to the countryside. The illustrative film raises the issues of downshifting and search of one’s place in the world.
This year’s Belarusian program of Northern Lights also features “In-touch”, an almanac by young directors. Its main topic is the influence of computers and the Internet on the young Belarusians’ lives, The four short films of the almanac portray various aspects of life: the gender, the loneliness, the daily struggles of people with disabilities, the work of a search party.
One of the almanac’s authors, Maxim Shved, is well-known to the Belarusian audience for his film “Pure Art”. His part in the almanac is “Within Four Walls”, a film about a man with a disability who managed not to fall out of social life and started his own distance learning language school “At Sava’s”. The almanac also features films by promising Belarusian directors, such as “Hello. Why are you silent?” by Ksenia Golubovich about a deaf young man’s life on social media, “All activities according to the plan” by Ales Lapo about the computer classroom in a village school, and “We need people” by Veronika Bondarovich about the Belarusian search and rescue squad Angel.
The schedule of the Belarusian program of “Northern Lights 2020” can be seen on our website. Especially for fans of Belarusian cinema, we have made a separate film package, which can be purchased here.
Translated from Belarusian by Marharyta Trubnikava
Main supporters: Nordisk KulturFond (Denmark), Nordic Council of Ministers Office (Denmark).
Co-organizers: Norwegian Embassy in Kiev, Danish Cultural Institute in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Current Time TV, Volia Films production company.
General partners: Finnish Liaison Office in Belarus, Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden in Belarus, Embassy of Estonia in Belarus, Embassy of Lithuania in Belarus, Embassy of Latvia in Belarus, Icelandic Film Centre, Finnish Film Foundation, Estonian Film Institute, Norwegian Film Institute, Swedish Film Institute, Danish Film Institute, Lithuanian Film Centre, National Film Centre of Latvia, B2B DOC - Baltic to Black Sea Documentary Network.
Partners: DoubleTree by Hilton Minsk Hotel, official distributor of Mazda in Belarus, Taxi 5, art-group «Sinie Gory», FirstRental rental house, «Svobody 4» bar, «Zerno» coffee shop, Moonlightroom.by, DataHata.by, Blockbuster.by, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.
Media partners: BYCARD, CityDog, mvradio.by, 34mag.net, AfishaTUT.by, TheVillage, Kyky.org