‘Letters From The Silenced Country’ review: Mixed-media documentary proves a raw, disquieting study of Belarusian resistance

Dir/scr: Andrei Kutsila. Poland/Germany/Lithuania. 2026. 75mins

This documentary from Belarusian filmmaker Andrei Kutsila is an inventive collage of voices and experiences belonging to a handful of people – three named, one anonymous – whose opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko’s Russia-backed government over the past six years has seen them killed, imprisoned, outlawed or exiled. Kutsila’s raw and disquieting film operates as an imaginative scrapbook of alternating first-person voices and is composed of animation, found footage, secret filming, surveillance video and still images.

Fear is embedded in the texture of the film

Letters From The Silenced Country acknowledges that it can only scratch the surface: a postscript tells us that over 65,000 people have been arrested or detained since Lukashenko’s widely-disputed August 2020 re-election and the popular protests and state repression that followed. It also resists offering much political or historical context, aiming instead for a more impressionistic view of what it’s like to fall foul of an authoritarian government. And it touches on those left behind. What do you write to a political prisoner? What photos do you send them? What if your father could be arrested at any minute?

The film premiered in Venice Open, winning the Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary, and now plays in DOK Leipzig’s international competition before screening at IDFA in November. The film’s unusual and intimate view of the human reality of political oppression should prove a valuable addition to documentary showcases, especially those focused on eastern Europe or human rights. It also stands as a stark and compassionate act of solidarity with those still suffering from Belarusian oppression, either internally or in exile. 

Kutsila himself is among the exiles: he left Belarus around the same time that he completed his second feature-length doc, 2021’s When Flowers Are Not Silent, which focused on women and families during the widely reported 2020 mass protests. Letters From The Silenced Country explores what happens once the headlines move on. The testimonies Kutsila collects are distinct and carefully chosen. We hear the content of letters sent between imprisoned activist Vitold Ashwarak and a relative; there’s a tragic gap between his resilience on paper (‘I’m a man of iron’) and the crushed individual we see on CCTV footage in a penal colony. (He died in prison in May 2021.)

We also hear an anonymous account of an activist still living in Minsk: an outlaw, trying to maintain a relationship with his young daughter and to avoid being arrested. We watch the recorded testimony of a former criminal investigator who left Belarus not long before the 2020 protests and who now lives in Poland, having been sentenced in absentia to 11 years for various crimes including sedition and extremism. 

The most prominent story belongs to Kasia Budzko who, at 20, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a penal colony for attending a political protest. Budzko’s drawings inspire expressive charcoal-style black-and-white animation by Natalia Spychała, which bookends the film and appears throughout. These sequences visualise in a poetic, dreamlike way the reality of imprisonment. The animation also blends smartly with live-action footage: there’s a striking scene in which an animated Budzko looks through the peephole of her cell and sees police arresting people at protests. Another powerful moment imagines her family and friends joining her in prison.

The stories are alarming, but equally haunting is the mix of visual styles that Kutsila employs to frame these intense experiences, subtly assembled by editor Piotr Ogiński. Surveillance and suspicion, unsurprisingly, are strong themes. Fear is embedded in the texture of the film. There are many images of soldiers or militarised police, sometimes looking at the camera or holding cameras themselves. We watch as a cursor moves about a computer screen, surveying images of people being surveyed or people surveying.

Nothing about Letters From The Silenced Country is a comfortable watch. It’s mournful and mysterious as it shifts artfully from one voice to another, one experience to the next. Helped by a quietly sinister electronic score by Vygintas Kisevičius and Paulius Kilbauskas, it succeeds in getting under your skin.