On the 10th of December 2022, on Human Rights Day, Our House will present the premiere of a film by Mikalai Maminau «‎War of Untruth», a documentary novel about the Belarusian protest. It is not a film just about something, it is a film for something. A human mind is constructed in such a way that it would clear of everything that can drive a person crazy. Fortunately, we often forget what has happened to us. However, if we forget what happened to us in 2020, then Lukashenka will really win, and we will lose.

Time of hope and time when that hope was shot, power in unity and powerlessness before weapons. Fists clenched from desire to fight back, but with no strength in them as people get out of breath and their eyes go blind because of grenades. Men’s and women’s tears of powerlessness. It’s not just the first impression from the film, it’s a flashback to what you saw with your own eyes and to what you heard from others.

It was too difficult to start writing right after watching it, right after another immersion in that water of events that will remain with us forever. Like those two years have never passed, you relive everything inside of you once again, like it was at the beginning of August, 2020: our desire to change everything to make things better and… and the desire to save everything as it was of those, who was happy to live exactly the way they were living. Desires of neither the first, nor the second ones have not come true. However, if we still have hope, the only thing they have is an illusion of the past. This is a reflection on the film.

It’s not just a chronicle of the events, there is emotion behind the chronicle that raises memories. Memories how many of us there were with just a road rock in the hands at best, and memories of their special machinery, weapons and unlimited resources.

There are two main stories told in the film, they are intertwining, but still different. It does not just bring you down to earth, it brings you closer to those minutes of doubt and inspiration, that we all experienced. When such different people, with different personalities, different characters and other so many different things, in their multiplicity decided together that they had enough and that they should change the world. We want to be responsible ourselves for our life, for our future, we want to build it for us.

This documentary novel reminded about what we did not manage to achieve back then. Yet, as they say, one that’s been caned is worth two that haven’t. We have got a bloody, cruel, yet very applicable in the future, experience. Actually, we are still getting it and giving meaning to it.

This film does not teach how to act in the future, it shows what kind of people we can and should be, so that our hopes could be implemented and our losses had not been in vain.

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