When Flowers Are Not Silent (2021) by Andrei Kutsila

Author

Sasha Razor

Abstract

Andrei Kutsila’s [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent (2021, Poland) relocates the violence of Belarus’s 2020 crackdown from the street into the home, following three women through the aftermath of detention, exile, and injury. This review argues that the film’s restrained observational form turns women’s daily care work into a counter-archive of authoritarian repression.

Keywords

Andrei Kutsila; Belarus; documentary film; exile cinema; 2020 Belarusian uprising; women’s protest; post-Soviet cinema; domestic space; counter-archive.

In a dim, black-and-white apartment, a woman stares into the glow of her phone. On the small screen, a loop plays: police batons, flash grenades, the slumped bodies of protesters. The room around her is intact. The violence sits in the palm of her hand. Andrei Kutsila, a Belarusian documentarian working in exile in Poland, returns to this image several times in [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent ( 2021, Poland), condensing the film’s central argument into a single frame. The home is not a refuge from Belarusian state terror but the site where that terror continues to replay and dismantle ordinary life long after the street has cleared. The film follows three women through the August 2020 uprising: the director’s sister Aksana, rebuilding her life after release from the notorious Akrestsina detention centre; a mother raising three children alone, navigating interrupted phone calls with her exiled husband; a woman nursing her husband, whose leg was shattered by a police grenade, until he too flees across the border. None of these stories is exceptional in Belarus after 2020. That is precisely the point.

Andrei Kutsila (b. 1983) trained as a journalist at Belarusian State University and then as a director at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts. He made most of his films through Belsat, the Warsaw-based Belarusian-language channel that for years was the only platform where independent Belarusian documentaries could be made without state money or censorship. His patient, observational films screened at Krakow, IDFA, and Warsaw, among them Svaio mestsa / Where You Belong (Andrei Kutsila, 2015, Belarus), Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War (Andrei Kutsila, 2018, Belarus), and Suma / Summa (Andrei Kutsila, 2018, Belarus). In 2020 he filmed relatives keeping vigil outside the Akrestsina for the short Stseny / Walls (Andrei Kutsila, 2020, Belarus); when the crackdown reached his own family and his sister was arrested, the footage following her release became When Flowers Are Not Silent (Andrei Kutsila, 2021, Poland). He completed the feature in exile in Poland, where he has lived since 2021 and co-founded the Belarusian Independent Film Academy. He is now finishing Listy / Letters (Andrei Kutsila, forthcoming), built from animation and political prisoners’ correspondence. Within the emerging corpus of post-2020 Belarusian exile documentaries, When Flowers Are Not Silent is distinguished by where it points its camera. Where some of his peers chronicled the streets in real time, Kutsila retreated into the domestic interiors where state violence continues to live – the apartments of the women who drove the peaceful resistance. His unobtrusive approach inherits the formal traditions of direct cinema and Eastern European observational documentary, and his black-and-white cinematography, with its compressed episodes of daily survival, transforms intimate observation into a sustained reflection on life under state terror.

The title invokes the female-led peaceful resistance that unfolded in Minsk as reports of torture at the Akrestsina emerged. Forming solidarity chains in white dresses and carrying flowers, these women refused both the brutality of the state and the violent responses an autocratic, patriarchal order expected of its opposition. The title also gestures toward the bouquets and makeshift memorials marking where protesters were killed – flowers as material traces of memory, speaking on behalf of those the regime has tried to silence (Kagaoan 2022). Visually, they stand in sharp contrast to the dark, impersonal uniforms of the riot police.

Kutsila developed the film’s cinematography with Maciej Woźniak: a stark, monochromatic treatment that turns the home into a political space where authoritarian violence persists in the rhythms of care, in broken time, in anonymous speech, in the pressure of off-screen sound. Shot almost entirely in black-and-white, the film strips away the chromatic vocabulary of ordinary life and returns the world to its essential textures – skin, fabric, plaster, the grain of a wooden door. The film’s tactile attention matters because meaning arrives less through what is shown than through what can almost be touched. Composition follows the same logic of containment: Kutsila and Woźniak favour medium shots and static framings, letting bodies move through the space rather than pursuing them. Nested frames – windows, mirrors, the rectangular screens of phones and televisions – recur throughout the interiors, carrying the outside world and its violent traces into the apartment. Through sensory restraint and bodily hesitation, the film produces an affective witnessing in which trauma is felt as intimate rather than displayed as graphic spectacle. The colourless palette is retained until the final sequence, when the image breaks into full colour: Aksana, who since her detention had grown too weary and fearful to join the protest marches, watches a rally from the sidelines and then – nervous, tears on her cheeks – steps back into the crowd.

Sound is one of the film’s principal political instruments. The visual weight is matched by a fractured sound design, developed by Bartosz Kawalski and shaped by Kutsila with co-editor Paweł Klepacz, that channels the psychological weight of repression directly into the domestic sphere. Rather than relying on graphic visual violence, the film evokes the horrors of political imprisonment through spoken testimonies of auditory trauma. Aksana describes the soundscape of the Akrestsina – the grating, metallic clang of prison gates, the off-screen screams of tortured men. This residual terror bleeds into the perceived safety of the home, where silence is never truly empty. Ordinary ambient textures – a hissing kettle, the clink of a spoon, the ticking of a clock, the creak of floorboards – work alongside off-screen sirens, police vehicles, muffled voices, buzzing phones. The sound montage carries the indexical weight of danger and conveys the constant threat of the authoritarian state without visually exposing its subjects to further risk. The emotional strain of exile is registered in interrupted phone calls between separated spouses, where conversations disintegrate in real time amid the noise of children – auditory evidence of the frayed threads connecting divided families.

This same economy of withholding governs the film’s temporal structure. Forgoing chronology in favour of compressed episodes of waiting, caregiving, and recollection, the editing builds a mounting pressure that registers the slow accretion of ocherstvenie – the “hardening” of feeling required simply to survive (El 2023). The formal choices advance a spatial argument: the true counter-archive of an authoritarian crackdown lies in the privacy of domestic spaces, in the bodies that hold injuries, in the families that bear absences, in the women who wait outside prison walls. By centring women as agents of unglamorous, daily care, the film refuses catharsis and insists that people must move forward anyway, carrying the weight of their trauma with them.

Domestic spaces are also where Belarusian identity is taught, rehearsed, and passed between generations. The scene that crystallises this most sharply is a political geography lesson. Checking her teenage son’s homework, Aksana asks him to distinguish between a territory and a sovereign state. Starting from colonial India, the boy arrives at his own country: Belarus, he says, is formally independent but governed by Russia, because European countries help each other while “no one is helping us and no one needs us. They are simply afraid of Russia”. Belarusian agency and Belarusian positionality within a geopolitically divided world order could hardly be stated more clearly, or from a more disarming source.

Far from being cathartic, testimony in the film is marked by incompleteness. Its most arresting moment, and its most ethically exposed, is the prologue scene in which Aksana recounts her detention. Her account is framed as formal testimony – evidence of crimes against humanity – and this framing pulls the film into a legal register that stands in sharp contrast to the quiet domestic routines making up most of its runtime. The shift matters because it recasts what the viewer will be watching all along: the caregiving, the interrupted phone calls, the waiting are the substrate of a crime that can be named and prosecuted. The camera holds this choice without editorialising. What could have been a scene of emotional intimacy becomes a legal record, an insistence that what happened inside Akrestsina can be spoken and made to count. It is also the film’s most uncomfortable moment. A director points a camera at his sister’s face as she accounts for her own suffering in the language of juridical procedure, and the familial proximity that might have softened the scene instead sharpens it. That discomfort is where the film lives.

When Flowers Are Not Silent has attracted significant attention on the European festival circuit, winning Best Documentary at the Warsaw Film Festival and receiving a Special Mention at Ji.hlava and a Jury Special Mention at Artdocfest Riga (Warsaw Film Festival 2021; Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival 2021; Artdocfest Riga 2022). Though it emerges from the 2020 uprising, it is better understood as an aftermath documentary: a film that relocates state violence from the square to the apartment, from the spectacular event to the damaged ordinary, and from public demonstration to care work. This relocation places the film within traditions of testimony and memory work, while also challenging the conventions of the event chronicle and heroic insurgency cinema. In Kutsila’s hands, domestic life, women’s labour, and sensory uncertainty become the materials of political evidence.

Critics have praised Kutsila’s formal restraint and emotional discipline. Mark Adams (2021) calls When Flowers Are Not Silent a “powerful, moving and engrossing film” that “refrains from angry polemic” in favour of “sadness, bravery and resilience”, while Paolo Kagaoan (2022) notes both its forceful treatment of torture’s aftermath and the narrative cost of leaving its participants unnamed. Rather than staging trauma as an immediate spectacle, the director presents it as something remembered, repeated, unevenly transmitted across domestic space – where private injury slowly acquires public, and specifically Belarusian, political meaning. What endures is not horror, which the director spares the viewer, but the gruelling quality of attention the film demands: to watch a woman wait or to sit with the affectless sentences of the severely injured is to be tested on one’s capacity to witness. Authoritarian regimes count on the short attention span of a world trained to move from one crisis to the next. Kutsila’s film refuses that logic. Its formal patience is its politics.

Sasha Razor
University of California Santa Barbara
sasharazor@ucsb.edu

Bio

Sasha Razor is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, United States, specialising in Eastern European and Russophone cinemas. Her research interests include silent film, minor cinemas, digital authoritarianism, and the cinema and visual culture of protest. Razor is a curator, journalist, and co-founder of the Russophone Los Angeles Research Collective. Her current research is on Belarusian cinema after 2020 and its exile and digital circulation.

Bibliography

Adams, Mark. 2021. “Ji.hlava IDFF Opener Review: When Flowers Are Not Silent by Andrei Kutsila.” Business Doc Europe, 27 October 2021. https://businessdoceurope.com/ji-hlava-idff-opener-review-when-flowers-are-not-silent-by-andrei-kutsila/.

Artdocfest Riga. 2022. “When Flowers Are Not Silent.” Artdocfest competition programme. https://artdocfest.com/en/movie/when_flowers_are_not_2021_71/.

El, Diana. 2023. “‘Dissenting Belarus’ through the Eyes of Belarusian Documentary Filmmakers.” Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, no. 22: 189–198. https://digitalicons.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/DI22_13_Diana-El.pdf.

Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. 2021. “When Flowers Are Not Silent.” Film page. https://www.ji-hlava.com/filmy/kdyz-kvetiny-nemlci.

Kagaoan, Paolo. 2022. “Persistence: Our Review of When Flowers Are Not Silent.” In the Seats, 28 August 2022. https://intheseats.ca/persistence-our-review-of-when-flowers-are-not-silent/.

Warsaw Film Festival. 2021. “37th Warsaw International Film Festival 2021.” https://wff.pl/en/about-wff/history/37-edition.

Filmography

Kutsila, Andrei. 2015. Svaio mestsa / Where You Belong. Belarus: Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2018. Stryptyz i vaĭna / Strip and War. Belarus: Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2018. Suma / Summa. Belarus: Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2020. Stseny / Walls. Belarus: Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. 2021. [Kali kvetki ne maŭchatsʹ] / Gdy kwiaty nie milczą / When Flowers Are Not Silent. Poland: Belsat TV.

Kutsila, Andrei. Forthcoming. Listy / Letters.

Suggested Citation

Razor, Sasha. 2026. Film Review: “When Flowers Are Not Silent (2021) by Andrei Kutsila”. Belarusian Cinema and the Protests of 2020: Cinema in Exile (ed. Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.433.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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