DOK Leipzig Review: Letters from the Silenced Country gives voice to persecuted Belarusians

Alexander Lukashenko has served as the president of Belarus since the country gained its independence in 1994. He's the longest-tenured president in Europe, and as you might imagine, he hasn't achieved that title justly. He is a dictator, squashing political opposition, forcing his opponents into exile, and imprisoning those who dare to oppose his regime. In 2020, it felt like change was on the horizon. Lukashenko's opponents were the majority, showing up in incredible numbers to protest. A new future for Belarus was so close, and yet...

Since those protests, more than 65,000 people have been imprisoned for political reasons. Even those who are freed often are forced from Belarus, often without their documents or possessions. Lukashenko's dictatorship makes no room for voices from the other side.

So Letters from the Silenced Country is a radical act of resistance, a way to let people around the world know about the plight of Belarus, the fear the people live in there, the impossible hardship they face day after day. One of the film's narrators talks about the weight of the fear he carries, because he knows that what he fears is inevitable. If he stays in the country long enough, he will be taken someday. Maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now. You always have to be aware, look over your shoulder, be ready to run. He talks about the realities of living in such a country, the rules he lives by. Don't keep money in the bank. Make sure your phone is always charged, so you're always able to answer phone calls from your loved ones. Don't keep valuables in the house.

It's a harrowing watch, as you can imagine.

The film is brilliantly assembled, putting together all sorts of footage and photographs, along with artwork. It really captures the feeling of paranoia, knowing that you are always being watched, and it attempts to flip the script as much as it can. Just as the powers-that-be in Belarus are keeping tabs on their citizens, cameras everywhere, facial recognition software, so does this film hold the government accountable for their crimes, the violence they're committing. One of the subjects featured in the film is working to assemble a database of everyone involved, documenting their crimes. For now, it might not do much, but in the future, when Lukashenko's regime falls and these people try to deny their part in the horrors, they will not be able to. Now there is a record that cannot be destroyed or scrubbed. After learning about this project, we see many of their faces one after another. The list goes on and on.

As you might imagine, considering I'm reviewing this film, animation plays a meaningful role in this film. One of the subjects is a young woman named Kasia, an artist. Her artwork is brought to life, showing what life is like behind bars in Belarus, both literally and figuratively. She shows the cramped cells, the high bunks, the close working quarters. We see her working at a sewing machine along other inmates, and washing in a cramped, crowded shower. But there are also moments that are more figurative, expressive: she likens living in prison to being in a tin can, and then we watch her climb an impossibly long ladder out of a tin can, all the way to her bunk, where she can catch a sliver of the outside world through a window.

These animated sequences are some of the film's most vivid and memorable (obviously for me, animation lover that I am). They have an almost Tim Burton quality to them, greyscale and tinged with horror. Kasia talks about how being able to draw in prison is a curse, because so many inmates want her to draw them pretty images to send home. Meanwhile, she wants to draw artwork that reflects her experience, her emotions, her life. She gets brought in because of the content of her artwork, and encouraged to draw mountains and landscapes and other innocuous things instead. For her part, she turns to abstract art, since it's harder for the guards to parse, impossible to censor.

As you might glean from the title, the film uses the letters, diaries, and notes of various people who have experienced political persecution and imprisonment in Belarus. And there's a lot of talk about how important letters are for them. They bring news from home, news of the world (since newspapers and radios aren't allowed), let you know that your loved ones are still alive. They're glimmers of life before, and hopefully life after.

And the film itself feels like a letter, in its own way. It's a way to reach out to anyone who watches it, to let them know about what's happening in Belarus. A plea for help? Maybe. The UN has decried what's happening there, but nothing seems to change. But it's good for us to know, to connect with other humans going through dark times, and to contemplate how we might support them, and how their reality could so easily become ours.