Yuliya Shatun

Nikita and Volha have been maintaining a dysfunctional relationship for the past 8 years. In the following movie they play fictional Nikita and Volha who have only just met. Can anything be started anew at the end of history?

Three directors make a movie about the events of their past week. Relationships, work, and day-to-day personal struggle—the minute details still fresh on their minds—are shown with unseen crystal clarity that challenges the very notion of dramatic fiction.

Minsk Komarovsky market is the main food market in Belarus. People call it “Komarovka”. It organically coexists people of all ages, backgrounds and characters. While for some the market has become a second home, others continue to dream of more.

In a small, snow-covered town in Belarus, a former English teacher manages to scrape a living distributing leaflets to people’s letterboxes. In the evening, he joins his wife in their dingy apartment, and together they reminisce about their son, a student in Minsk they rarely see. Possibly their only excitement of the week is buying a lottery ticket, which, for a few seconds, gives them a chance to dream. Yuliya Shatun’s camera, at first oddly focused on the white expanses along every roadside, then begins to scrutinise the teacher in his comings and goings – a precise recording with, however, a hint of the moroseness of a terrain so rare in today’s cinema. The teacher has stoically adapted to a degenerate world and a life fuelled by stifled shame. An odour of neglect wafts between the apartment blocks, the uttered words and the background noise of the television. A certain irony floats in the air too, and it needs Yuliya Shatun’s patience to grasp and take responsibility for it.

Listening to the persistent humming sound, we follow the author on her existential journey through four cities consisting of real images and footage taken by the director’s father 25 years ago that always bring us to some visible or invisible border.

The film centers on a high-school student experiencing the last day of summer.

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

For nearly 10 years, Belarus has had a Shelter — place for women victims of domestic violence. This is a big private house in Minsk. Many victims are brought here directly in their home clothes — the only thing they were able to escape from the aggressor. Belarus has not yet adopted a law on combating domestic violence. In this issue, you will find out the real stories of residents of the Shelter, what problems not only clients but also employees of the shelter have to face, and why it is so important to pass a law.