Information only trickles out sporadically from isolated Belarus. And those held in Belarusian custody seem almost out of reach. Having fled to Poland himself in the wake of state repression, Andrei Kutsila brings the fates of three detainees to light in this film testimony, which is polyphonic at both a narrative and visual level. They represent the more than 65,000 people who have been criminalised and detained since Alexander Lukashenko’s controversial re-election in 2020. There is Kasia, a student who uses her art to find a way to cope with everyday life in captivity. Rendered in dark tones, her drawings offer insights into a harrowing situation, while simultaneously serving to guide the viewer through “Letters from the Silenced Country” in animated form. Then there is the activist Witold Aschurak, who receives photographs from a friend while in prison. Footage from surveillance cameras documents his mistreatment before his eventual death in custody. Meanwhile, former detective Andrei Astapovich is in Poland investigating the crimes committed in his former homeland and compiling evidence for the Belarusian opposition organisation BYPOL. An anonymous man also gets his say; he lives in constant fear of being arrested. Andrei Kutsila’s film is a compilation of true horrors – right in the midst of Europe.

Carolin Weidner

How much black humour does it take to defy the horror? “The Masturbator – The Adventures of Edgar Hilsenrath” delves into the radical world of the writer and Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath – one of the first who dared to face the trauma with grotesque wit and unrestrained laughter. In a mixture of animation and historical archive material, the film follows Hilsenrath’s alter ego from his novel “Fuck America”: a penniless, sex-obsessed writer in 1950s New York who is desperately trying to publish his memories of the ghetto under the title “The Masturbator”. Writing becomes an obsession, a provocation and an act of survival. Born in Leipzig in 1926, Hilsenrath’s path took him through Nazi Germany, Bukovina and a Transnistrian ghetto via Palestine and France to America and back to Europe. A journey through places of loss, hope and disappointment. A journey through a century in which the ghosts of fascism keep returning. Burlesque animations collide with raw, real-life images. This friction gives rise to the portrait of an artist whose books are international successes but who fell into obscurity in Germany. “The Masturbator” combines biography, memory and the present to create a film that is as unsettling as it is liberating, about the power of satire and the necessity to speak out against forgetting.

Ola Staszel