This Belarussian necropolis is a place where some people can meet with dead family members and spend time on contemplation. Few others try to look for the traces of the past there, some come just for a walk and yet another group engages into family feasting. Next to strollers and contemplators, there sometimes come cats creeping among the tombs and squirrels looking out from trees. Immersed in deadly silence, the cemetery comes to life from time to time, while the faces from tomb photographs, frozen in time, look at all this in silence.

Epitaph

“We are living on the edge”, says a simple peasant woman from Dubna, a village in Hrodna region. These words sound symbolic: the village is situated on the steep bank of the Neman, and the river keeps undermining the houses and the plots making the villagers seek for new lands.

We Are Living on the Edge

Documentary portrait of a rural Belarusian doctor.

Waltz

Two men, a Finn and a Belarusian live alone, on a lake's island.

The Robinsons of Mantsinsaari

After the collapse of the USSR, several not yet old single men returned to their parents' huts in a small Belarusian village. Not remembering the past, not thinking about the future, men live one day, escaping from loneliness with vodka and conversations. They are fragments of that life that has passed and which they will never return or glue together.

Splinters

In 1942, the front line passed in the Vitebsk and Novgorod forests, thousands of Soviet soldiers died here. Today, on the Belarusian-Russian border, enthusiasts are looking for human remains that have not yet been buried according to the laws of peacetime, not wartime. According to human laws.

Earth

This is a strange little place, where in winter, among the snowdrifts and frozen ice waterfalls, it is very warm. Men and women half-dressed, heated. Their movements at the machines are perfect - fast, rhythmic, precise, like a dance. The relentless rumble of cars is like music. Such an impeccable harmony between people and mechanisms that they seem to be something single, whole, a continuation of each other. Only for moments does a debugged endless action interrupt: someone thinks, or wipes sweat from his forehead, or sits down to breathe. People at this factory in the village of Smilovichi near Minsk make felt boots, which are then sold around the world.

Warmth

Godforsaken places where people live detached from society are still present in the world. But Belarus, a country integrated into civilisation processes, can hardly boast of their existence. The authors tell the stories of two families residing in Rasony district, in a forest close to the border with Russia. Having gone bush they do without electricity, communication and other habiliments of civilisation. Being eager to start a new life they came back to the native country from big cities – Moscow, Saint Petersburg... But their dreams and expectations confronted Belarus's reality...