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The community of Belarusian filmmakers in exile have gathered in Berlin to honor their own, presenting the second-annual Belarusian Film Critics Awards, the Red Heathers.

The awards, presented at Berlin’s European Film Market (EFM) are as much a display of political resistance as they are a celebration of artistic excellence. Thousands of Belarusians fled the country following the contested 2020 presidential elections there when the Aliaksandr Lukashenka government began cracking down on peaceful pro-democracy protestors.

At the EFM last year, exiled filmmakers launched an independent film academy. A parallel independent Belarussian Film Critics Association was also set up, with support from the German Marshall Fund, Poland’s Trzy Trąby Fund, and the Goethe-Instituts in Exil, a special section of the German cultural institution which supports artists and intellectuals from countries where the Goethe Institute had to shut down their operations due to war or political interference.

The Red Heather prizes...

Nikita Lavretski. Photo by Christopher Small.By his own count, Belarusian filmmaker Nikita Lavretski has released eight multimedia works this year: three mid- or feature-length films, one TikTok series, two stand-up specials, a short, and A Kid’s Flick, first screened at festivals at the end of 2021 but which he released online in 2022. It’s an astonishingly prodigious run even for a filmmaker well known—if known at all—for the speed and quantity of his output. Jokes About War and A Date in Minsk, the best of the bunch, played at Doclisboa last month, only a year after A Kid’s Flick had its world premiere at the same festival.Without a doubt, I count these films among the most significant and audacious of the year, though perhaps as much for personal as for cinematic reasons. Jokes About War was one of the first films of any kind released...