Belarus: Recalculating Route (2020) by Maksim Shved

Author

Katya Lopatko

Abstract

Maksim Shved’s documentary began with a simple premise: recording conversations between taxi drivers and passengers to capture the mood before the 2020 Belarusian presidential election. While filming the post-election protests, the director himself was detained, beaten and jailed alongside thousands of Belarusians. The resulting film captures a society on the brink of upheaval while also foreshadowing the stalled transformation and repression that would define Belarus after 2020.

Keywords

Maksim Shved; Aliaksandr Lukashenka; Belarus; documentary film; 2020 protests; cinéma-vérité; Belarusian cinema; political documentary; taxi cinema; pre-traumatic testimony.

Maksim Shved’s documentary [Belarus: Marshrut perabudavany] / Belarus: Marshrut perestroen / Belarus: Recalculating Route (2020, Belarus) began with a simple premise: recording conversations between taxi drivers and passengers to capture the mood before the 2020 Belarusian presidential election. Instead of wrapping on election night as planned, Shved kept his camera rolling on the streets of Minsk, where mass protests erupted following the falsified election results – he realised the real story was just getting started.

The title, Recalculating Route (a more accurate and sometimes used translation is Route Recalculated), employs a driving metaphor to convey the film’s transformation by the very events it set out to observe, along with the country’s uncertain future. Shved himself faced a ‘recalculated route’ after the election: while filming the protests, he was detained, beaten, and jailed alongside thousands of Belarusians for participating in ‘mass unauthorised events’. The resulting film captures a society on the brink of upheaval while also foreshadowing the stalled transformation and repression that would define Belarus after 2020.

Produced by the independent Russian-language network Nastoiashchee vremia / Current Time, part of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the 54-minute documentary was initially conceived as a portrait of the pre-election mood in a country that has had only one president, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, since 1994. Elegant in the simplicity of its premise and techniques, Belarus: Recalculating Route captures a fleeting moment: a society suspended between two futures. Rather than reproducing the spectacular imagery that came to define international coverage of the 2020 protests, this documentary foregrounds the psychological forces behind the headlines – hope, fear, desire, frustration, indignation, and ambivalence – lending context, nuance, and specificity to the universal narrative of society revolting against a dictator. It documents not just the forces driving dissent but also the confusion, uncertainty, and fragmentation amid the mass movement.

The film opens by following its two protagonists, taxi drivers Pavel and Anna Mikhailovna (Hanna Mikhaĭlaŭna), as they begin their workdays in the Belarusian cities of Minsk and Baranavichy. Over mundane shots of public spaces, a radio broadcast reports on the upcoming presidential election. Throughout the film, radio broadcasts provide important context, including explanations of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaia’s candidacy following the arrest of her husband, political blogger and activist Sergey Tikhanovsky (Siarheĭ Tsikhanoŭski). One early sequence captures the film’s central tension: OMON (AMAP) riot police jog through a park in black balaclavas, passing in front of a woman in a wedding dress, reminding viewers that ordinary, private celebrations in Belarus always occur in the shadow of state violence.