The Wheel

A film by Victor Asliuk about a painter called Andrei, who is a huge fan of director Andrei Tarkovsky and who lives in a basement of a multistore city house.

Two men, a Finn and a Belarusian live alone, on a lake's island.

The woodcarver Mikalai Vasilevich Tarasiuk, a folk craftsman of Belarus, lived in Pruzhanshchyna. Near his house is a unique museum "Memories of the Fatherland", which has no analogues in the country. The self-taught master carves figurines from wood, decorates them with vines and straw, and arranges them into scenes from peasant life and everyday life. Specialists call this kind of activity instinctive art. That is, his creativity was formed naturally and such is free from the sphere of any professional influence. Through the personality of the hero and his wooden people, the film provides an opportunity to join the ancient way of life of Belarusians, which is gradually disappearing.

This is a strange little place, where in winter, among the snowdrifts and frozen ice waterfalls, it is very warm. Men and women half-dressed, heated. Their movements at the machines are perfect - fast, rhythmic, precise, like a dance. The relentless rumble of cars is like music. Such an impeccable harmony between people and mechanisms that they seem to be something single, whole, a continuation of each other. Only for moments does a debugged endless action interrupt: someone thinks, or wipes sweat from his forehead, or sits down to breathe. People at this factory in the village of Smilovichi near Minsk make felt boots, which are then sold around the world.

Documentary portrait of a rural Belarusian doctor.

This Belarussian necropolis is a place where some people can meet with dead family members and spend time on contemplation. Few others try to look for the traces of the past there, some come just for a walk and yet another group engages into family feasting. Next to strollers and contemplators, there sometimes come cats creeping among the tombs and squirrels looking out from trees. Immersed in deadly silence, the cemetery comes to life from time to time, while the faces from tomb photographs, frozen in time, look at all this in silence.

Film by Victor Asliuk featuring the artist Viktar Kabac, shot in Poland.

This is the film about woman's autumn. Her photo was published in numerous newspapers. She appeared on TV. She got thousands of letters with proposals of friendship and love. Some time all Soviet Union knew her. Maria is the name of a tractor heroine famous in the Soviet era, now alone in her cottage in the country.

After the collapse of the USSR, several not yet old single men returned to their parents' huts in a small Belarusian village. Not remembering the past, not thinking about the future, men live one day, escaping from loneliness with vodka and conversations. They are fragments of that life that has passed and which they will never return or glue together.

Yanka Kupala, Belarusian poet and writer, is one of the spiritual symbols of Belarus. He did everything to make Belarusians feel like a full-fledged people. This is a figure that cannot be reduced by anything from the height of modernity. But the weight of recognition, inclusion in the ranks of the classics leads to petrification of the face. The authors of the film remove this petrification - verses sound throughout the film. Patriotic songs that sing the praises of Belarus and our people, awaken them from historical apathy and eternal longing. Mystics who whisper about the revival of the past that sleeps in the mound. And intimate and lyrical, filled with intimate beauty, eternal sensuality and lust for life.

In the film, Ernst Tsitavets, a resident of Minsk, relives certain experiences and tells about his friend Lee Harvey Oswald, the person who is allegedly responsible for assassinating U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The documentary is set in the block of flats Nr 4 in Kamunistychnaya street, in the very apartment where the American ‘tourist’ lived after his arrival in Minsk. Ernst Tsitavets was then a medical student and loyal Komsomol member, who, however, secretly listened to the BBC. There they disputed on the standards of life is better in the West and in the USSR.

At Stalin’s and post-Stalin’s times a lot of people from Belarus (then Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic) were resettled. On the one hand, the families of „public enemies” had to be kept somewhat farther away. On the other, underpopulated territories of the Soviet Empire needed to be cultivated. So the family of little Belarusian Alexej Kliunia was moved to an island in the midst of Ladoga Lake in Carelia. Now some decaded have passed and already old Alexej Kliunia is left alone on this island. The lonely Belarusian on the deserted Russian island among the ruins of the formerly active life has created a miniature Belarusian Republic, in which he is the only citizen. In his hut he hang the Belarusian flag over his bed and sleeps underneath. He fixed a portrait of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to the mirror. Alexej Kliunia often talks to himself. Or to his only friend – horse Almaz.

Godforsaken places where people live detached from society are still present in the world. But Belarus, a country integrated into civilisation processes, can hardly boast of their existence. The authors tell the stories of two families residing in Rasony district, in a forest close to the border with Russia. Having gone bush they do without electricity, communication and other habiliments of civilisation. Being eager to start a new life they came back to the native country from big cities – Moscow, Saint Petersburg... But their dreams and expectations confronted Belarus's reality...

Ivan and Stepan live alone on a distant farm. They are over 60, and they have never been married. Day after day, their life is filled with work, work against the backdrop of magnificent nature. “In order to live, you need to work - this is how the white world works, this is how our lives work,” says one of the characters, expressing his understanding of the meaning of life, and at the same time the main pathos of the film.

Slowed down, blown up and newly scored 1930's footage depicting daily life and religious rituals of villagers from Bryansk Polesia on the border between modern Russia and Belarus.

In 1942, the front line passed in the Vitebsk and Novgorod forests, thousands of Soviet soldiers died here. Today, on the Belarusian-Russian border, enthusiasts are looking for human remains that have not yet been buried according to the laws of peacetime, not wartime. According to human laws.