A Kid’s Flick (2021) by Nikita Lavretski:

A Realist Fantasy and the First Feature Film About the Belarusian Protests

Author

Anonymous

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

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 wit