A Kid’s Flick (2021) by Nikita Lavretski:
A Realist Fantasy and the First Feature Film About the Belarusian Protests
- Abstract
- The first Belarusian feature film about the 2020 protests, A Kid’s Flick, is an underground film by Nikita Lavretski (Mikita Laŭrėtski). In their review, Anonymous compares the Belarusian film to the film by the Russian director Boris Guts, MINSK (2022, Estonia/Russia), and considers elements of realism and fantasy in the way Belarusian cinema captures the nebulous “structures of feeling” in a time of radical change.
- Keywords
- Nikita Lavretski (Mikita Laŭrėtski); Volha Kavaliova (Vol’ha Kavaliova); Boris Guts; Belarusian cinema; A Kid’s Flick; A Date in Minsk; MINSK; 2020 Belarusian protests; fantasy; realism; structures of feeling; women and protest
- Table of contents
- yes
Editorial Note
We publish this review anonymously for the author’s safety: they are a film critic working inside Belarus. The review continues this volume’s discussion of canon formation and the post-2020 fracture of the Belarusian filmmaking ecosystem. At stake is who gets to define the Belarusian protests for the world.
Its central polemic is a rebuke to MINSK (Boris Guts, 2022, Estonia/Russia), widely advertised and internationally received as the first feature film about the Belarusian protests. Anonymous provides evidence that this distinction belongs instead to an underground Belarusian film, A Kid's Flick (Nikita Lavretski [Mikita Laŭrėtski], 2021, Belarus).
The stakes of this correction are decolonial. In a culture scattered into exile, prison, and silence, deciding which film came ‘first’ is a decision about which images will seed a collective memory and speak about Belarusian experience to the world. Belarusian culture, built across repeated ruptures from the executed poets of 1937 to the dismantling of its independent institutions after 2020, has long battled erasure and cultural appropriation. To let MINSK occupy that position, as the inaugural account of the Belarusian uprising, is to repeat precisely the appropriation this review sets out to name.
Russian director1 Boris Guts came to the subject through media coverage of the uprising, which had moved him (Pugachev 2022). The film was not even shot in Minsk: the production scouted the city in Tula and ultimately filmed it in Tallinn, one Soviet-looking cityscape standing in for another. The Belarusian filmmaking community condemned MINSK almost universally; director Maksim Shved placed it in the exploitation genre, arguing that it exploits the theme of violence, presenting it as a series of attractions (Euroradio 2022). Its reception history sharpened the point: at a Polish premiere at the Belarusian-run Bulbamovie festival the film was received with sharp criticism of cultural appropriation and complete lack of understanding of Belarusian realities in general, and, specifically, the experiences of the Belarusian uprising.2 Тhe controversy exposed a structural asymmetry: MINSK’s hyped visibility threw into relief the obscurity in which Belarusian filmmakers’ own accounts of 2020 circulated.
The review reclaims the right of first enunciation for A Kid’s Flick, a micro-budget film that presents the protests of 2020 obliquely, through the lens of childlike anime-inspired fantasy, shot inside a flat in Minsk, without a single word uttered: a gesture that carries the weight of Belarusians’ collective trauma – and of their cinema’s reflection on it.
***
It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that if a post-Soviet country has anything of note happening, it must be described, defined, and evaluated by Russians. For the longest time after the current stage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine started in 2022, most experts consulted by the Western media were, in fact, Russians. It is also hardly surprising that the first released feature film about the Belarusian protests of 2020 is considered to be the one made by a Russian director, Boris Guts. The promotional description of MINSK (Boris Guts, 2022, Estonia, Russia) presents it as a tale of “romantic and passionate sex and the bloody chaotic hell of survival in less than 80 adrenaline-packed minutes” (PÖFF 2022), and it is indeed a wild fantasy romp that has very little to do with how most Belarusians see the events of those days. Guts is the sole author of the screenplay, and, despite having producer Vitali Shkliarov (Vital’ Shkliaraŭ) as one token Belarusian voice, little to no research was put into the creation of the film whose engagement with Belarusian reality was both hasty and second-hand. According to the director himself, the first draft of the script was written in just one month following the August events, and the filming was originally scheduled to be completed in record time, before winter, with an already assembled crew hired for another film (Pugachev 2022). Additionally, both the exploitative nature of the film and the fact that it was granted significant European funding while most Belarusian filmmakers were struggling to make ends meet, let alone realise one of their many projects, drew widespread criticism (ReformNews 2022). Nonetheless, the film garnered some awards and had limited distribution, and it remains largely undisputed that MINSK is indeed the first released feature fiction film about the Belarusian protests of 2020.
However, the situation is less straightforward than one might think. While Guts’s film was released in Estonia on 6 May 2022, A Kid’s Flick (Nikita Lavretski, 2021, Belarus) had already been shown in Portugal on 29 October 2021 at the Doclisboa International Film Festival, and the latter film’s synopsis unequivocally states that it concerns the same events, that is, the protests in Belarus: “Coming from the heart of the Belarusian Rebellion, an intimate portrait of a young woman. When her regular self enters emotional turmoil, her seifuku-wearing magical witch alter ego is keeping the fighting spirit ablaze” (Lavretski 2021). The film alternates between the mundane sequences of following the heroine3, played by Volha Kavaliova (Vol'ha Kavaliova) in her daily activities, and her transformation into an anime witch, straight out of the Sailor Moon universe, equipped with a magic dagger, as she ‘goes out’ into the world to join the protests, which we only witness indirectly, as the character watches the footage on her devices. The camera’s intense fixation on the heroine includes eroticisation, prompting critics to talk about the male gaze that follows the character at all times. It also reminds us that the title A Kid’s Flick is to be understood literally – it is as if the film was shot from the perspective of an adolescent boy obsessed with anime. The anime alter-ego of the heroine comes home more bruised and injured day after day, until, unbeknownst to her, she is followed home by masked monsters, easily identifiable to the viewer as stand-ins for police brutality. The monsters break into the flat, beat the heroine up with police batons, and wreck her home in a search. The heroine manages to send out a magic signal, and two more female anime witches appear – together the three women vanquish the monsters, rip a monster’s heart out and perform a magic ritual, prevailing, in the end, over evil.
So how did Guts’s later film become ‘the first’? The principal reason seems to be that, while A Kid’s Flick is openly an anime-inspired fantasy, MINSK is realist, at least in style. It is, however, realist in the same way Game of Thrones (David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, 2011–2019, United States) is ‘realist’. The events that happen in both never actually happened; their worlds are imaginary (although the world of MINSK somewhat resembles Russia, more than anything); the accents do not quite fit;4 and they are dark and gritty, featuring sweaty sex scenes, which, thanks to the HBO show, have also become emblematic of a certain brand of realism. MINSK relates to the city of Minsk in the same way Game of Thrones relates to medieval Europe. The only significant differences are that Benioff and Weiss’s show has dragons, while Guts’s film was shot in one take, which confers a certain amount of verisimilitude, of being present.
A Kid’s Flick, conversely, is highly stylised, having more of a dreamlike quality. We barely see Minsk there, with most of the action happening inside a small flat. The film begins with the street noise intruding from the outside while the protagonist is lost in a moment of private pleasure – masturbation as escapism, or perhaps an act of desperately needed self-care; she then proceeds to put on her headphones and have a cute little dance to the music we cannot hear, have a smoke, and play with a cat.
It almost plays out as a slice-of-life erotic fantasy,5 up until the moment when the young woman turns on her computer to watch the videos of protests. A large part of the film consists of these alternating moments of hedonistic distraction, housework, and “going out” (the phrase is an iconic rallying cry of 2020 that signals a resolve to join despite many risks), watching the videos, and breaking down in tears.
What we see in the film is very much like the routine of many people during the protests. Even when the heroine is performing some occult rituals for her anime alter-ego, it does not look like too much of a stretch, and could just refer to the ritualised nature of routines that helped people steady their nerves before going out to take part in the protests. The ‘fantasy’ part of the film, ironically, is not even dressing up in an anime magic-girl costume; it is bringing a huge knife with you and fighting back with actual weapons in response to state violence.
Even though the seduction of violence was always lurking in the background, that is where it remained, since the Belarusian protests remained peaceful, for better or worse. It is also telling that magic, as a way of making sense of traumatising reality, as we see in A Kid’s Flick, has become a theme in Belarusian cinema and has even found its way into documentary cinema, for example, in Sasha Kulak’s Mara (2022, France/United Kingdom/Belarus, reviewed in this volume).
Much later, a very different director, Andrei Kashperski (Andrėĭ Kashperski) also found himself at a dead end, with “his only solution turn[ing] out to be an explosion of violence and magic”, both in the television series Pratsėsy / Processes (Kashperski and Mihas Zui [Mikhas’ Zui], 2023, Poland, reviewed in this volume) analysed by Mikhal Sandyha (Sandyha 2026), and in his later short horror film Sud miortvykh / Judgment of the Dead (Kashperski, 2025, Poland). Coincidentally, Kashperski also has a minor part in A Kid’s Flick, that of one of the monsters.
A Kid’s Flick mirrors the actual protests in many other ways as well. The importance of “going out”,6 or what could rather be seen as ‘coming out’, stems from the last words of the murdered Raman Bandarenka that became one of the most popular slogans of the Belarusian protests. “Going out” refers not just to literally going out of one’s house, but rather to participating in protests as a gesture analogous to ‘coming out’ as one’s true self publicly and in solidarity with one’s community even if it comes at a high cost. The above-mentioned element of erotic fantasy in the film, the intense male gaze of the camera as it follows the heroine in her intimate moments, has nothing to do with fetishising ‘youthful rebellion’, as Bernardo Bertolucci famously did in The Dreamers (2003, France/Italy/United Kingdom), ironically also mostly set in the confinement of a single apartment. The male gaze of A Kid’s Flick is noticeably oppressive, as the camera is always relentlessly fixed on the heroine, but it is also symbolic of the patriarchal nature of the state apparatus behind the brutal suppression of the protests, described with regard to the Belarusian context in Olga Shparaga’s book U revoliutsii zhenskoe litso [The Face of the Revolution Is Female] (2022). To underscore the defeat of the patriarchy in A Kid’s Flick, the film even ends with a brief moment of joyful sisterhood, when the three anime witches vanquish the monsters, trying to remain hopeful despite all odds.
Overall, while A Kid’s Flick is undoubtedly a fantasy, it has significant mimetic value in that it reflects the “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) of a particular time and place, and should be considered the first feature fiction film about the protests of 2020. Whichever film we choose as the ‘first’, it is not insignificant that Nikita Lavretski went on to expand on the context of the Belarusian protests and the subsequent repressions in some of his later films, such as [Spatkanne ŭ Minsku] / Svidanie v Minske / A Date in Minsk (2022, Belarus) and Ulysses (2024, Belarus), whereas Boris Guts has easily moved on to a new ‘hot’ subject, making Kurdid armastajad / Deaf Lovers (2024, Estonia) about Ukrainian Sonia, who meets and falls in love with Russian Dania in Istanbul during the war.7
Anonymous
Notes
1 Editorial Note (EN): “Russian director” refers to professional formation, not ethnicity or citizenship. Guts's career was built in the Russian film industry, and MINSK, an Estonian-Russian co-production, was initially planned for shooting in Tula and sought a Russian distribution certificate before bans in both Russia and Belarus pushed its release to Estonia (Euroradio 2022).
2 EN: At the Bulbamovie discussion, critic Maksim Zhbankou dismissed MINSK as “cinema shot by a Martian” (Euroradio 2022, translation ours). A Belarusian critic writing anonymously for Zerkalo catalogued the film’s failures of cultural specificity, including Russian advertising in a Minsk lift and Belarusian tracks relegated to background noise while Russian songs carry the musical themes (Zerkalo 2022).
3 EN: Lavretski’s creative partner and spouse, Volha Kavaliova, received a 2024 Red Heather Award for Best Actress for her starring performance in the film.
4 EN: At the film’s Warsaw screening, the actors’ “Moscow accent” was raised as a distinct point of criticism, to which Guts replied that Belarusians also speak Russian (Euroradio 2022). The reply misses the point: most Belarusians do speak Russian, but Belarusian Russian is phonetically distinct. To a Belarusian ear, Moscow-accented speech in a Minsk courtyard is immediately audible as foreign.
5 In a report on DocLisboa and specifically A Kid’s Flick, Christopher Small (2021) discusses the film’s male gaze following the heroine in mundane and erotically charged moments, and, then, states the following: “Only by making a puerile erotic fantasy, Lavretski noted when introducing the film, which he dedicated to ‘all my friends in prison,’ could he begin to speak about such gigantic subjects as politics, resistance, or, indeed, confinement of any kind.”
6 EN: “Going out” is now an emblematic phrase in Belarus akin to “I can’t breathe” in the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. “I am going out” (“ia vykhozhu,” in Russian, “ia vykhodzhu” in Belarusian) was a social media post by Raman Bandarenka (Raman Bandarėnka) as he joined the protests and later that same day was murdered by the authorities. Square of Changes (Ploshcha peramen) became the iconic place of Belarusian resistance because it was a courtyard of Bandarenka’s house. There, protesters kept gathering after his death, creating a powerful and iconic site of civil disobedience and communal mourning that has produced a multitude of cultural responses. In recent cinematic history, this is where journalist Katsiaryna Andreeva (Katsiaryna Andrėeva) was arrested, covering the protest, and her story became the foundation of Under the Grey Sky (Mara Tamkovich, 2024, Poland), another feature film about 2020, reviewed in this volume.
7 EN: Deaf Lovers landed in a similar controversy, only this time with the Ukrainian community. The film was pulled from the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival “Standing with Ukraine” programme after a backlash. The State Film Agency of Ukraine called for removing the film and stated: “Given the aggression of Russia against Ukraine and the sufferings of the large number of Ukrainian people, it is of paramount importance to ensure that cultural platforms do not become tools for films blurring the boundaries of understanding the reality of Ukrainians.” (Lang 2024).
Bio
The author’s identity is withheld for their safety.
Bibliography
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Lang, Jamie. 2024. “Russian Director’s ‘Deaf Lovers’ Pulled From Tallinn Festival’s Ukrainian Section After Backlash”. Variety. November 13. https://variety.com/2024/film/global/russian-directors-deaf-lovers-pulled-from-tallinn-ukraine-section-1236209235/.
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Filmography
Benioff, David, and D. B. Weiss. 2011–2019. Game of Thrones. Home Box Office (HBO).
Bertolucci, Bernardo. 2003. The Dreamers. Recorded Picture Company / Peninsula Films / Fiction Films.
Guts, Boris. 2022. MINSK. Leo Films.
Guts, Boris. 2024. Kurdid armastajad / Deaf Lovers. Max-Grip.
Kashperski, Andrei. 2025. Sud miortvykh / Judgment of the Dead. Belsat TV.
Kashperski, Andrei, and Mihas Zui. 2023. Pratsėsy / Processes. Belsat TV.
Kulak, Sasha. 2022. Mara. Les Steppes Productions.
Lavretski, Nikita. 2021. A Kid’s Flick. Self-produced.
Lavretski, Nikita. 2022. [Spatkanne ŭ Minsku] / Svidanie v Minske / A Date in Minsk. Self-produced.
Lavretski, Nikita. 2024. Ulysses. Self-produced.
Tamkovich, Mara. 2024. [Pad shėrym nebam]/ Pod szarym niebem / Under the Grey Sky. Media Corporation.
Suggested Citation
Anonymous. 2026. Film review: “A Kid’s Flick (2021) by Nikita Lavretski: A Realist Fantasy and the First Feature Film About the Belarusian Protests”. 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.2026.00022.443.
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