Courage - he does not use the word for himself.

Rather speaks with a defensive smile of the "paranoia" he felt in the last few days of shooting.

That someone suddenly walks into his room and takes the hard drives with the material.

Or that his work gets cashed at the airport.

Nothing happened in the late summer of 2020. The militia were so busy with the demonstrators on the streets of Minsk that the airport fell out of sight.

Eva-Maria Magel

Head of culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Aliaksei Paluyan, born in 1989 in Baranovichi in Belarus, has been at home in Kassel since 2012, right in the middle of it all. In the sea of ​​red and white flags, which the Omon militia turned into a blood-red color time after time with violence against the peaceful demonstrators. He accompanied the wrestling of Maryna, Pavel, Denis from the Belarus Free Theater, the central actors of his film, when they took to the streets after the presidential election in Belarus in August 2020.

Not a single one of the protagonists from Paluyan's documentary “Courage” lives in Minsk.

Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland are the stations of their exile, where they try to gain a foothold, support their families and continue to make political theater - while the societies there are tense in the face of migrants from Belarus, who are targeted at the borders of Europe as a means of political pressure Union to be sent.

“300,000 people have left the country - the most ambitious, smartest, most active from culture, from IT.

I can't just show the film at festivals and make my career.

I am responsible.

I have the material in my hands that not many filmmakers had, ”says Paluyan.

"It's not just a movie, it's the real life of these people."

Dramatic conditions

Basically, Paluyan has changed over the past three years. With the film he took on the responsibility of creating awareness for the dramatic conditions in his country, which are an “absolutely European issue”. The fact that this Europe knows so little about its neighbor Belarus, although it is so much closer to Western Europe than Russia, is a sore point. An “informational vacuum”, created by Alexandr Lukashenko, who is often referred to as the “last dictator in Europe”. “It's our job to change that.” Which is why “Courage” also falls back on the 1996/97 protests and their crackdown and shows the long red threads of repressive politics and the opposition.

The Belarus Free Theater impressed Paluyan himself when he was still living in Belarus and studying computer science. Then he decided to become a filmmaker at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. The first successes came quickly, the short film "Lake Of Happiness" won the Hessian Short Film Award in 2019, toured internationally and also secured a place on the longlist for the Oscars by winning the festival in Los Angeles. Now he is hoping for an international career for “Courage”, first of all he will be recognized as a “Newcomer” at the Hessian Film Prize.

He has never shot anything as dramatic as “Courage” before, says Paluyan.

The political free theater that does not let itself get down, although its director lives in exile and staged from there via video chat, the courage of the actors, the independent artist should be the focus of a film - that's the plan for 2018. But one director says Paluyan, must be like a dog, smell processes that lie in the future.

So he experienced it himself and was right in the middle of it.