Voices of the New Belarus

This Russian-language film began life as a play by Andrei Kureichik, a companion piece to his Insulted. Belarus(sia), of which Oksana Mysina made a film in 2020. It features a star-studded cast of Russian and Belarusian actors and politicians who came together to express their solidarity with the political prisoners in Belarus who are are beaten and murdered by the current, illegitimate regime, which lost the presidential election in 2020, but refused to give up power. Please read Andrei Kureichik's foreword to his play:

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The process of writing a play is usually associated with the arousal of one’s powers of imagination and one’s ability to transform reality artistically. In that case reality is merely an excuse to express an idea, a thought, or an emotion. But the text that follows is not like that. This is the first time I have written a play in which I totally rejected both any authorial text, and any attempt to stylize or interpret facts underlying the text. Sometimes the truth requires nothing more than to be told. Sometimes no one can express something better and more accurately than the prototypes themselves, those who have gone through experiences that no imagination can conjure. My authorial input in this text consists only of seeking out and reading many hundreds of testimonies of the victims of political terror in Belarus in order to choose 16 voices that would form a mosaic capable of providing a single integral picture of what has happened in Belarus. This text is a collective confession of a nation that has been beaten, raped, and insulted. These are the voices of victims of violence, people who have suffered terribly. The text comprises public interviews and letters from political prisoners, and from Belarusians who have suffered from repression. All names and surnames are genuine. Their stories form a document. A document of historical significance.
 

This is a documentary text based on published interviews, testimonies and letters of Belarusians who were victims of political terror in Belarus during the 2020 revolution. Those individuals are: Vitaly Marokko, Pyotr Kirik, Mariaa Kalesnikava, Marina Karabanova, Sergei Melyanets, Nikolai Statkevich, Alexei Berezinsky, Roman Zorich, Igor Losik, Anatoly Kudlasevich, Andrei Proskurin, Zhanna Lagutina, Polina Zvezdova, Marina Zolotova, Stepan Latypov, and Vitold Ashurok.