Mara (2022) by Sasha Kulak

Author

Rita Safariants

Abstract

In Sasha Kulak's hybrid documentary Mara (2022), the 2020 Belarusian uprising unfolds through the folkloric Red Queen, casting the revolution as a feminine force against a masculinised police state. Rita Safariants traces how the film’s blend of myth and witness breaks in its final minutes, when poetic abstraction gives way to the raw footage of a protester’s violent detention.

Keywords

Sasha Kulak; Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya; Aliaksandr Lukashenka; Belarus; police state; protest; documentary cinema; trauma.

In Sasha Kulak’s Mara (2022, France, U.K.), which was shot during the anti-Lukashenka protests in Belarus and is described as a “hybrid documentary” (Lagarias 2022b), a “fever-dream” and a “poetic and striking piece of art” (Finlay n.d.), the revolution is female. Deliberately resisting “typical ‘reportage’” storytelling (Lagarias 2022a), Kulak’s account of the 2020 Belarusian Spring features dreamscapes, soundscapes, elements of phantasmagoria, video art, and modern dance that coalesce into both a parable and a witness account of what, in the director’s words, “trauma does to the human psyche” (Lagarias 2022a). The film centres on the title character of Mara, or the “Red Queen”, a spirit in Slavic folklore, who appears during sleep to bring dreams or nightmares, presenting a distinctly feminine perspective on political violence.

Motifs of motherhood, fertility, and feminine rage are underscored by the film’s red-and-white colour palette, symbolic of the Belarusian protest flag. Images of water, blood-red paint, green foliage, spilt milk, as well as the film’s emphasis on female corporeality, both static and in motion, moving through and alongside crowds, and writhing, wrapped in red fabric, on a sandy beach – all gesture toward a primal, mythical feminine force that has gripped the country, unwilling to recede or acquiesce to totalitarian terror.