Motherland (2023) by Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka

Author

Jakob Wunderwald

Abstract

In this review of the documentary [Radzima] / Motherland (Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka, 2023), Jakob Wunderwald shows how a film about hazing in the Belarusian army, and about a mother fighting for justice after her son's death, grows into a statement on state violence in Belarusian society. The Belarusian uprising of August 2020 overturns the world of the film and the lives of its young protagonists.

Keywords

Belarus; Ukraine; army; state violence; protest; dedovshchina; documentary cinema; 2020 Belarus presidential elections; military; justice; court; solidarity; war; refugees.

[Radzima] / Motherland (2023, Sweden, Ukraine, Norway), a full-length documentary film by two Belarusian directors, Alexander Mihalkovich (Aliaksandr Mikhalkovich) and Hanna Badziaka – the former an experienced filmmaker, the latter a veteran journalist for the independent Belsat TV station – confronts forms of state violence that run deep in Belarusian society. On the surface, it is a film about dedovshchina (hazing), the systemic abuse many novice army recruits suffer at the hands of senior recruits and officers, but through that prism it addresses different societal processes that culminated in the Belarusian mass protests after the falsified 2020 presidential elections and their violent suppression: the inability of the justice system to deliver justice, the crushed hopes of a whole generation of young people, and the yearning to break out of long-established patterns of submission. Therefore, Radzima serves as a far-reaching portrait of the deep, multi-layered crisis that Belarusian society has been experiencing over decades of authoritarian dictatorship and of its protagonists’ ultimate inability to transcend it.

The film interweaves two main storylines. The first follows Sviatlana Korzhych, a woman from a village in the Pinsk region, whose son Aliaksandr was found hanged in the Pechy training base near Barysaŭ, where he had been serving since May 2017, a few months into the compulsory military service required of most Belarusian men.. Aliaksandr’s death – not the only one on the base – was officially ruled a suicide, although its circumstances pointed towards foul play. A significant public debate in Belarus had followed at the time, but to little avail. In the film, we bear witness to Sviatlana’s desperate attempts at getting justice for her son as well as to the connections she makes with relatives of other victims of dedovshchina in the Belarusian army.

The other storyline takes viewers to the city: there, a group of twentysomethings is enjoying life, involved in underground culture – raves, late-hour hangouts, smoking – until one of them, Nikita, is called upon to do his military service. Shortly after the start of his service, mass protests break out across Belarus, pitting the friend group on opposite sides of the historic moment: most of them take to the streets, hoping for the fall of the regime, while Nikita is part of the military force that quashes the demonstrations.

The film was conceptualised and filmed over a long period of time under the adverse conditions of a historical rupture: filming began in 2018, a year after Aliaksandr Korzhych’s death, and lasted well into the post-2020 period. The protests were not expected by the directors; they forced themselves into the movie by necessity: as Hanna Badziaka tells in an interview with Zerkalo, the filmmakers had underestimated the possibility of such a historic event, and could not foresee the strong effects it would have on their protagonists’ fates (see Tarnalitskiĭ 2023). The movie had to be finished in emigration, since its directors, like many Belarusians, were forced to flee the country after the protests. Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, became their new home base, and it is where they were working on the film when Russia’s full-scale invasion, partially carried out from Belarusian territories, began. Shots from the Ukrainian-Polish border, depicting the second great flight movement the Belarusians were forced to become part of, form a coda to the movie. After its completion in 2023, the movie was shown at several festivals and received a number of awards: among them the Dox:Award prize at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen and the FIPRESCI Award at the goEast Film Festival (2023) in Wiesbaden. The film also swept the 2026 Red Heather Belarusian Film Critic Awards with wins in Best Documentary Feature Film, Best Director, and Cinematographer.

The film opens with a shot of railroad tracks, evoking the travels its heroine Sviatlana has to undertake from her village home to go to the military base, to meetings with other victims’ relatives, and to court. The screen cuts to black, to English-language explanations for the “non-translatable” (Dolin 2024) term dedovshchina. Another cut follows, this time to a large group of people walking through a cityscape in a common direction. One cannot help but think of the 2020 protests here – but this is not the case: the people are walking to a military event where young recruits swear their oath between displays of tanks and other military gear.

This is the closest the film ever gets to the actual army. Later on, and necessarily so due to the mechanisms of an authoritarian state without real possibilities for media inquiry into its inner workings, the Belarusian military becomes a kind of black box: nobody inside will really talk, there is no possibility of actually finding out what goes on inside – only dead, battered bodies get out of there. This is where Sviatlana’s story begins. The camera follows her to the court proceedings, to the cemetery where she tries to get a priest to consecrate her son’s grave, and to meetings with other mothers of dedovshchina victims.