Kalinovski Square by Yuri Khashchavatski

For some reason, political prisoners, state-controlled television and megalomaniacal dictators seem to belong to a different world than jeans, cell phones, digital cameras and instant soup. Violence and injustice is harder to recognize in combination with these signs of so-called civilisation. Especially when it happens right under our European noses.

Kalinovski Square makes a bold, almost Michael Moorian, statement against the powers that be in Byelorussia. Commander-In-Chief Lukashenko has won the presidential elections for the third time in a row, with a staggering 80% of the votes. Not surprisingly the people suspect that the results have been meddled with, and the film shows them starting a demonstration at Oktober Square - renamed ‘Kalinovski’ - in Minsk. Most of them are youngsters, students in jeans, who are strong enough to hold out in the raging blizzards and icy coldness of the white Russian winter. Besides the elements, they have to fight a government which uses every possible means it can think of to, firstly break the demonstrators’ spirits, and secondly get rid of them. But Lukashenko always thinks only about the happiness of his people. “See ?”, a voice says with the image of a pondering president, “He is thinking about it now”.

Through Khashchavatski’s grandfatherly voice-over, we get lulled into what seems like a bedtime fairytale. It doesn’t appear to be real at first. The combination of found footage and an explanatory yet mocking narrator would have almost taken the film to the verge of fiction, had it not been that the outcome is strongly sarcastic. With that, the personal testimonies and the camera in the centre of action show that what we see actually is real.

After a while, the kind grandfather turns into an annoying repetitive schoolmaster, who points out the same thing with an almost palpable passive-aggressiveness over and over again, leaving us feeling like little children who can’t keep up. Luckily, the balance between this voice-over, interviews and the actively co-demonstrating camera saves the film from becoming tiresome and it succeeds in making its point. To make a film like this in Byelorussia is a big risk for Khashchavatski. Freedom of speech does not exist and many journalists have disappeared. Kalinovski Square has been put on a black list. This only serves to underscore the general argument against a government that is unwilling to see the needs of its own people.

Maartje Alders