Natalia Kaliada

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A celebrity meets a person at the airport. All is fine until the person finds out that if they return home, they will be arrested.

Alone explores the existential pain of Ukraine through the eyes of an unlikely protagonist, one of the country’s most commercially successful pop stars. Andriy Khluvniuk, lead singer of hip-hop rock band Boombox, has millions of devoted young fans who adore him as a singer songwriter and sex symbol but know nothing of his personal turmoil caused by the political instability and military aggression in his homeland. Andriy is on a mission to raise awareness and motivate his fans to join him in taking a stand against the war in the east of Ukraine, and call for the release of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and political prisoner in Russia. As tensions between Ukraine and Russia become a footnote on the world’s media agenda, Andriy use his fame to refocus the global spotlight on the fragile independence Ukraine is fighting for. The film culminates in an incredible sequence of events that result in Oleg Sentsov's release in a prisoner swap. Andriy and Oleg can meet each other at last.

The Okrestin Sisters is a Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) and Creatives Politics Hub production, shot and directed by a film-maker and BFT ensemble member, Kolya Kuprich. This short captures the first moments upon the release and the immediate witness accounts of three BFT members who were arrested in Minks on August 9th 2020, following the Presidential Election. BFT's General Managers, Nadia Brodskaya and Svetlana Sugako, along with the BFT actor Dasha Andreyanova were rounded up and detained while peacefully waiting for the results of the election at a local polling station. What followed their detention, was a surreal cascade of a Kafkaesque, bureaucratic judiciary system met by brutal, Gestapo-type assault on innocent citizens of Belarus. All happening away from the cameras, behind closed doors, inside authoritarian prisons. The creators of the film want the shed light on what took place in Belarusian prisons during the detentions of August 9-14.