D: Watching the film, I was a little afraid of your ending. However wild it sounds, you don’t have the privilege of some political filmmakers to end on a bright note.
AK: I hope viewers won’t stay with a single emotion, as there are layers. Ultimately, you see that a person in prison can somehow find a form of existence and remain human, which is itself a form of survival, if not resistance.
I think of Ihar Karnei, a Radio Liberty journalist who went through so much in prison, recently released and now in the Azores. After such a brilliant career and education, he became a manual laborer, but what’s important is that he survived, is healthy, and has four daughters. When people say there’s no hope—for me, there is, just a different kind; neither sentimental nor grandiose. It comes from an inner feeling rather than any aim to make the film endlessly hopeless or to invent a happy ending.
D: I frame it this way because the film ends with Kasia confirming the protagonists’ fears of the correspondence rules tightening further.
AK: Yes. I don’t even write anymore. Before, you could hope a letter would get through, but now they are mostly destroyed, so why waste money and paper? You can write for the drawer, though, or photograph a letter before sending it. That’s how I wrote to a friend, who read my letter only after his release.
D: What also strikes me is that the film dispels romanticized ideas of revolution, showing the tough price of a lost protest, especially when so quickly forgotten. How do you answer the question of the price freedom?
AK: Freedom is a luxury—a key concept Europeans don’t grasp unless they’ve fought for it. Poles understand us better, having lived under the Polish People’s Republic, though their attitude toward Belarusians changed once Belarus sided with the aggressor. We are the same people, and it’s wild to be judged by your passport.
But I’m not complaining. Thank God we went through those protests, or we’d be treated far worse. Had the state carried out quiet repression in advance, preventing the protests altogether, we would face even bigger problems. We were lucky to take to the streets then, because today’s system makes that virtually impossible unless you want to rot in prison for fifteen years. The trouble is that outsiders read this as people not fighting hard enough. Ukrainian friends, before 2020, asked why we didn’t topple Lukashenko, while I envied and supported the Maidan, because, despite living amid terrible corruption, you go out and fight.
D: I strongly supported Belarus, but our conditions were completely different.
AK: Exactly, because how do you fight without weapons? If everyone were armed and resisted the same way, without the influence of Moscow—which can always roll in with tanks and which you must always account for in the region—we’d have sorted out our own country. A new generation will grow up that hasn’t been beaten. When a peaceful crowd takes to the streets, I’ll probably join them. I may know we’re doomed, but I’d find it hard to stay home.