PRICE OF FREEDOM

Alexey Poluyan's film “Courage” has been awarded with 32nd Hessian Film Prize. The award ceremony will take place today in Offenbach, Germany.

 

“Courage” is much more than a documentary: It is a screaming call to pay attention to the dramatic situation in Belarus. The same appeal was heard in the film by Andrey Kutilo, who won the Warsaw Film Festival "When the Flowers Are Not Silent" (we wrote about this before).

 

Alexey Poluyan does not like to use the word „courage“ in respect to himself. With a protective smile, he speaks of the "paranoia" he experienced during the last few days of filming. When it seemed to him that someone suddenly enters his room and picks up hard disks with the film, or at the airport someone takes away his work.

But at the end of summer 2020, the police were so busy with brutal suppression of protests and demonstrators on the streets of Minsk that they had no time for the airport.


 

Alexey Poluyan, born in 1989 in Baranovichi, has been living in Kassel since 2012. He lives, as he puts it, in a sea of red and white flags, which Omon turns into blood red over and over again, using violence against peaceful demonstrators.


None of the main characters of Poluyan's documentary "Courage" lives in Minsk. Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland are the stations of their exile.

 

“300,000 people have left the country - the most ambitious, the smartest, the most active in culture, in the field of information technology,” says Poluyan. "This is not just a movie, this is the real life of these people."

 

In making the film, he took it upon himself to draw attention to dramatic events in his country. The fact that Europe knows so little about its neighbor Belarus, even though it is much closer to Western Europe than Russia, is a sensitive issue. "It's our job to change it". That is why “Courage” depicts the protests of 1996/97 and their suppression, and shows the long red threads of repressive politics.


“Courage” shows the actors of the Belarusian Free Theater, who, knowing how great the danger is, show political theater in underground places, and then go to demonstrations, risking their lives. You see a rapid escalation, desperate mothers, children waiting in front of prisons to find out anything about the whereabouts of their loved ones who were arrested, kidnapped and beaten during the demonstrations. The police, beating up peaceful protesters, you see a soldier, whom the protesters decorate with flowers ...

 

“I`ve realized that the repression is really starting. I wanted to finish the film quickly because my job was to get that across to everyone".

 

"Europe needs a "new strategy for Eastern Europe", he says, understanding his film as "a clear appeal to European politicians and world politics".

 

“The longer you ignore it, the more serious the problems become. The higher the price for people who lose their lives and go to prison. I wonder what else should happen before the case finally comes to the Hague Tribunal? .. "

 

 

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