Mara (2022) by Sasha Kulak

Author

Rita Safariants

Abstract

In Sasha Kulak's hybrid documentary Mara (2022), the 2020 Belarusian uprising unfolds through the folkloric Red Queen, casting the revolution as a feminine force against a masculinised police state. Rita Safariants traces how the film’s blend of myth and witness breaks in its final minutes, when poetic abstraction gives way to the raw footage of a protester’s violent detention.

Keywords

Sasha Kulak; Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya; Aliaksandr Lukashenka; Belarus; police state; protest; documentary cinema; trauma.

In Sasha Kulak’s Mara (2022, France, U.K.), which was shot during the anti-Lukashenka protests in Belarus and is described as a “hybrid documentary” (Lagarias 2022b), a “fever-dream” and a “poetic and striking piece of art” (Finlay n.d.), the revolution is female. Deliberately resisting “typical ‘reportage’” storytelling (Lagarias 2022a), Kulak’s account of the 2020 Belarusian Spring features dreamscapes, soundscapes, elements of phantasmagoria, video art, and modern dance that coalesce into both a parable and a witness account of what, in the director’s words, “trauma does to the human psyche” (Lagarias 2022a). The film centres on the title character of Mara, or the “Red Queen”, a spirit in Slavic folklore, who appears during sleep to bring dreams or nightmares, presenting a distinctly feminine perspective on political violence.

Motifs of motherhood, fertility, and feminine rage are underscored by the film’s red-and-white colour palette, symbolic of the Belarusian protest flag. Images of water, blood-red paint, green foliage, spilt milk, as well as the film’s emphasis on female corporeality, both static and in motion, moving through and alongside crowds, and writhing, wrapped in red fabric, on a sandy beach – all gesture toward a primal, mythical feminine force that has gripped the country, unwilling to recede or acquiesce to totalitarian terror.

While not directly mentioned in Kulak’s film, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s position as the protest movement’s political leader remains an implicit referent throughout the narrative, metaphorically reifying the spirit of the Red Queen who is repeatedly summoned in a rhythmic incantation, “we will need the leaves of the moon tree, the cry of the simplest yet most ornate bird, dozens of dried-up tears, and a lock of female hair”.

Simultaneously symbolising hope and danger, Mara, whom Kulak depicts as a masked figure in red or white in nature, among playing children, and meandering alongside Minsk’s street protests, is an embodiment of Belarus itself, offering both motherly protection and outrage directed at Lukashenka’s repressive regime. In fact, most protesters in Kulak’s frame appear to be women, setting up an archetypal gender binary within the protest movement, wherein the feminine calls for change, while the masculine is aligned with the repressive police state.

In a series of particularly poignant scenes, female protesters clash with riot police while attempting to appeal to their shared humanity by invoking the concept of universal motherhood. “You all are normal boys, your mothers gave birth to you, comforted you!” says one woman. Another holds up an icon and sings a prayer to the Virgin Mary. After one young woman is forcibly detained for seemingly minor infractions (holding up an iPhone camera while standing on the street), Kulak’s camera transitions to a crowd of female protesters, clearly surrounded and outnumbered by riot police, who rhythmically chant, “Where is your mother?” in a final emotional appeal. To which a middle-aged policeman responds, “My mother is at home with the children”, at once repudiating the women’s effort at unification and asserting patriarchal mores.

Political compliance through violence or coercion is rarely sustainable indefinitely, something Kulak’s film alludes to when a woman wrapped in the red and white protest flag exclaims, “There is no going back. I don’t know how they are going to turn us into sheep again.” The statement reads as both feminist and irreverently anti-totalitarian, fusing the fight for gender equality with civil resistance. With Lukashenka’s police state personified and enforced by young men (“normal boys”), totalitarianism is at once infantilised – “Even children are not afraid of you”, one female protester casually observes – and positioned as a force of ultimate evil, which Mara is not able to escape completely.

Indeed, Mara distils Soviet-era gender archetypes of the Motherland being brutalised by the lawless Fatherland into symbolic narrative devices that drive the film towards its violent end. The Red Queen’s masked face is repeatedly juxtaposed with Lukashenka’s helmeted army, whose faces are obscured by riot gear. Kulak’s long-take pan of their bodies, uniform, still, and menacing, is shot from the eyeline perspective of the title character, who moves alongside this human behemoth of state terror, like a predator’s potential prey that has yet to be chosen. These sequences, which meander in and out of the film’s two representational modes – documentary-style footage and performance art – make the tonal shift of Mara’s last scene the most unsettling.

For the documentary’s first 45 minutes, elements of Kulak’s visual vocabulary are almost Parajanovian: the title character’s long flowing robes, towering headpieces, and static poses, as well as their folkloric undercurrents, conjure up images of poet Sayat Nova in Nran guyne / The Colour of Pomegranates, highlighting the ornate potentialities of the filmic medium, which, to an extent, aestheticise the film’s protest scenes as part of the cinematic spectacle. This dynamic is abruptly broken in the film's final fifteen minutes. Kulak’s editing is chilling in the way it transitions from the lyrical visual metaphor of milk dissolving in water to the unedited cellphone audio of a protester’s interaction with riot police minutes before she is brutally detained and assaulted. The accompanying footage of the pavement alongside hurried footsteps and an increasingly tense verbal exchange rips us away from Mara’s poetic dreamscape into a lived reality of a young woman’s violent encounter with state terror.

The victim’s testimony that follows, as well as the film’s prologue, paint a bleak picture for Belarus’s future. “We all used to share one dream, but what’s left is just shared pain”, concludes the film’s narrator in Mara’s last street scenes. In her final procession, the Red Queen, summoned and present among the largely female masses, has clearly brought nightmares to the Belarusian Spring. Kulak’s film, while bearing witness to the violence of Lukashenka’s police state, nevertheless gestures at kernels of change that Mara’s journey has unearthed. This shift can be observed in the voices and faces of children on the playground, who wrap themselves in crimson fabric and paint the Red Queen’s portrait with clumsy smeared strokes. Or in the semblance of doubt that fleetingly crosses a young riot policeman’s face as he nervously sizes up the protest crowd swelling around him. While inhabiting the contours of a folkloric myth, Kulak’s story of resistance is also inscribed into the small gestures of a people irrevocably transformed by pain, fear, grief, and, most importantly, by daring to hope despite all odds.

Rita Safariants
University of Rochester
msafaria@ur.rochester.edu

Bio

Rita Safariants is an Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Soviet Rock on Screen: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of a Film Genre (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026).

Bibliography

Finlay, Rose. n.d. “Review: Mara.” Kino Critics. https://www.kinocritics.com/article.php?ar=1692.

Lagarias, Antonis. 2022a. “Interview: Sasha Kulak on Mara.” East European Film Bulletin 125 (May). https://eefb.org/country/belarus/sasha-kulak-on-mara/.

Lagarias, Antonis. 2022b. “Personal Dreams and Collective Nightmares in Contemporary Belarus.” East European Film Bulletin 125 (May). https://eefb.org/perspectives/sasha-kulaks-mara-2022/.

Filmography

Kulak, Sasha. 2022. Mara. Les Steppes Productions.

Parajanov, Sergei. 1969. Nran guyne / The Colour of Pomegranates. Armenfilm.

Suggested Citation

Safariants, Rita. 2026. “Mara (2022) by Sasha Kulak”. Belarusian Cinema and the Protests of 2020: Cinema in Exile (ed. Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.429.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This licence does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms