Shame on you! film director Kureichyk tells Belarusian culture ministry

The 70th Berlin Film Festival was held from February 20 to March 3. Belarusian director Andrei Kureichyk was also present at the event in the German capital, but not as a participant of the forum, but as an ordinary viewer and film lover. Belarusian films were not presented at all at the festival. This is the reason for Kureichyk's angry and very emotional post on Facebook in relation to the Ministry of Culture in particular and the state of the Belarusian cinema industry in general. A representative of the independent film industry of Belarus completely lost his temper. 

"Everyone is represented here: Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Tajikistan, all our neighbors... Rwanda, damn, Rwanda has its own stand! Rwanda is the poorest country on this planet! There were genocide and a complete mess, but it now has a stand at the Berlin film market. Sudan, torn apart by war, is the most dangerous place on the planet, as the encyclopedias claim, and there you go, they are at the film market! Sudan! Forget Sudan, North Korea is also here!" writes Kureichyk.

The director recalls that, according to the Ministry of Culture, the state invests $10 million a year in the national cinema. 

"And this is despite the fact that several million dollars of taxpayers have just been invested into the Kupala and Vyrvich. The films are ready. They are not shown to Belarusians. So, there were to hang huge posters of these films with a schedule of screenings for buyers, flyers were to lie around, media screens were to be ready, but the entire management of Belarusfilm, from Karacheusky to Porshneu and Igrusha, was to run around the stands of world sale-agents, distributors, festival agencies, selling the films, making a schedule of world shows and premieres..." the director continued.

Kureichyk summed up his post with a rhetorical question: "Why shoot a project [the Kupala film- Euroradio], which obviously will not be shown in any form on the Russian market, and not to present it in Europe?!

Andrei Kureichyk is a Belarusian director and scriptwriter, author of such independent Belarusian projects as Garash (2015) and Party-zan Film (2016). He has also co-authored major Russian projects: he has worked on scripts for commercially successful films such as Yolki (2017) and Going Vertical (2017).

In late 2019, Andrei Kureichyk finished shooting his last film LIBERTÉ in Belarus. The philosophical drama was shot by the film company BezBuslou Arts in partnership with Red Studio first in the village of Kraski, Vaukavysk district, then in Minsk. The film is expected to premiere in 2020. The film was made without state support.