Belarus

Vladimir Piskunovich

Credits and Biography

Film Still

Elena Silutina

Credits and Biography

Film Still

Jury Statement

Vladimir Piskunovich, Fanya

The filmmaker managed to find an interesting cast for his main roles, was able to convincingly reconstruct the film’s time and place (western Belarus in 1939), and clearly expressed the film’s central conflict: the moral confrontation between the cruelty of a state’s ideological system and the living human spirit, which is crushed by that system. Events are presented in a very condensed way thanks to a very interesting cinematic narrative device: certain fragments of the protagonist’s life are “cut out” of the story by means of an imaginary camera. However, the film never loses its main narrative thread in the process. The expressive camerawork and the very evocative score further serve to create the right historical atmosphere.

Elena Silutina, The Last War

Elena Silutina manages to convincingly realize the competition’s topic, the deep and indelible traces that WWII has left behind in all people who lived through it. Silutina approaches this subject indirectly by presenting the difficult relationship between two generations. One generation is represented by an old war veteran, the other by a young skinhead from the early 21st century.