Making Films Without a Country:

Vladimir Kozlov on the Microbudget Film Incubator

Author

Sasha Razor

Abstract

Vladimir Kozlov (Uladzimir Kazloŭ) is a Belarusian Russophone writer and filmmaker in exile, and a co-founder of the Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network. In this interview he discusses the network’s Microbudget Film Incubator, his 2023 project built on the premise that an independent Belarusian feature can be made on a minimal budget, and the question its success leaves open: whether a cinema made by directors absorbed into other countries’ industries can still be called Belarusian.

Keywords

Vladimir Kozlov (Uladzimir Kazloŭ); Yuri Semashko (Iury Siamashka); Max Zhbankou (Maksim Zhbankoŭ); Leanid Kalitsenia; Belarusian cinema in exile; microbudget cinema; Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network (BFN); Microbudget Film Incubator; Belarusian Russophone literature; exile filmmaking; post-2020 Belarus; national cinema and co-production; AI and filmmaking.

The Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network was founded in 2022 by three exiles: the producer Leanid Kalitsenia, the culturologist and film critic Max Zhbankou (Maksim Zhbankoŭ), and the writer and director Vladimir Kozlov. Its premise was that the professional infrastructure independent Belarusian cinema had never possessed at home could be improvised abroad: no national film school worth the name, no functioning industry, no continuity of production. BFN has since become the connective tissue between filmmakers scattered across Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, and beyond. The most ambitious project under its banner was Kozlov’s. In the autumn of 2023 he launched a Microbudget Film Incubator on the proposition that an independent Belarusian feature could be made for under several thousand dollars and a digital camera. Confirmation arrived from the festival circuit within eighteen months. In February 2025, the Incubator’s first graduate, Yuri Semashko’s (Iury Siamashka) Lebiadzinaia pesnia Fiodara Ozerava / The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov (2025, Lithuania, Germany), had its world premiere in the Forum section of the Berlinale. A second cycle is now underway, with the prospect of another selection. Kozlov stepped down from the BFN board in April 2026 but has said he intends to see the Incubator through its next cohort.

Kozlov is in his early fifties. He was born in Mahilioŭ, an industrial city in eastern Belarus, and grew up on its outskirts in the long unravelling of the Soviet order. In 2000, he moved to Moscow, where he stayed for twenty-two years. His 2002 debut Gopniki (Hoods), published by Ad Marginem, was named Ex Libris’s prose book of the year and made him the literary chronicler of the post-Soviet provincial street: working-class Belarusian boys rendered in a stripped-down idiom of slang and reported speech, without sentimentality or sociological frame. The novels that followed appeared on every shortlist that mattered in Russophone fiction and were translated into English, French, Serbian, and Slovak. In 2013, with no film school behind him, he directed his first feature, Desiatka / Number Ten (Vladimir Kozlov, 2013, Russia), adapted from his own novella of the same name and shot for almost nothing on a borrowed digital camera; it took the Bronze “Flowers of Taiga Hope” prize at the Spirit of Fire festival in Khanty-Mansiysk that same year. Several more independent features followed, made on the same terms: small crews, small sums, no producer’s diktat. Anomiia / Anomie (Vladimir Kozlova, 2016, Russia) received a special mention at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2016, and his screenplay for [Leta ’89] / Leto ’89 / Summer of ’89 (Vladimir Kozlov, 2022, Belarus) shared the Belarusian Film Critics Red Heather Award for best script in 2024. After the invasion of Ukraine, he was gone from Moscow within weeks, first to Istanbul, then to Germany.

The conversation that follows takes up what August 2020 meant for a Belarusian writer who had spent two decades watching the same authoritarian playbook run, in slow motion, in Moscow. It traces his decision to leave Russia in 2022 and the loss he registers in finding himself a person, as he puts it, without a country to call his own. And it tests the central bet that the Microbudget Incubator is making. Kozlov had wanted to teach a younger generation to make something edgy, rebellious, formally daring, to build a new aesthetic out of the constraint itself. That part of the dream, by his own account, has not come to fruition. The films are accomplished, but they are not the radical cinema he set out to provoke. The harder question, which Kozlov returns to at the close of the interview, is whether Belarusian cinema made by filmmakers absorbed into other countries’ industries can still be called Belarusian at all.

SR: Vladimir, like many Belarusians, you left for Moscow, where you became a successful writer and journalist. But in 2013 you made your directorial debut with an adaptation of your own novella, Desiatka. What drew you to cinema?

VK: It started a little earlier. My first interest in film came after the publication of my first book, Gopniki,¹ when I was brought in to work on the screenplay for Andrei Proshkin’s Igry motylʹ kov.² Twenty years on, I can’t claim my contribution amounted to much, but I did try. That was my first encounter with cinema – a world that felt very remote from me at the time.

The interest stayed with me, but there was no obvious way into the industry: you had to study at VGIK or take the higher courses,³ and that didn’t really appeal to me. Technology kept moving on, though. In 2011, a man from Cheliabinsk called Evgenii Grafov wrote to me saying he wanted to make a microbudget feature based on my novel Platskart. That happened to be the one novel of mine whose film rights had already been sold, so I had to turn him down. But the very fact that someone in Cheliabinsk was prepared to make a no-budget film from my novel struck me. Microbudget, no-budget – for me these are practically synonyms. I’ve always had a minimalist instinct: get the most from the least. So I suggested Grafov adapt my novella Desiatka instead, which I’d written a couple of years earlier, and that we relocate the action to the present.

It came together with enormous technical difficulty. Had we been forced to shoot on film, nothing would have come of it. But by then the first half-decent digital cameras had appeared – designed primarily for stills, but capable of recording reasonably good video. We spent nothing on the film beyond transport and food on set; everyone worked for free. And then, out of nowhere, it landed at the Spirit of Fire (Dukh ognia) festival in Khanty-Mansiysk.⁴ The early 2010s were a curious moment in Russia: authoritarianism was already tightening, but there was still some freedom in cinema, and a great deal depended on the individuals doing the festival programming. At that Spirit of Fire, in the competition for Russian debut films, roughly half the films had emerged from nowhere, just like ours. For a brief moment, one had the illusion that the industry might work differently. It turned out to be just that – an illusion.

After that film, producers were telling me I was on the wrong track: the film mentions Putin in a less-than-favourable context. It wasn’t even censorship, more self-censorship – above all on the part of producers who depended on state money. I took part in pitching sessions, in events attached to official festivals, and realised it was leading nowhere. But the precedent was there, which meant the way forward was to stay in microbudget territory rather than try to fit into the industry. I was already forty, already a writer with a dozen books, and I had little appetite for slotting myself into that system. So I made several more microbudget features in Russia, and then one in Belarus.

SR: You have made several independent feature films, including the recent Summer of ‘89, presented at the European Film Market in Berlin, and the unusual documentary project Traces in the Snow, about Siberian punk rock. Looking back at your filmography, which of your own projects do you consider the most personal or the most pivotal for you as a director, and why?

VK: I’d single out not one film but three – the last three I made in Russia: Anomie, As We Want It, and Three Comrades. They form a trilogy, an attempt to diagnose Russian society through young protagonists, rendering it as fundamentally sick. For me they cohere as a single whole, even though their production histories were very different and they were shot in different cities with different people. They’re part of one idea I wanted to realise. Fortunately, I managed to see them through, despite all kinds of difficulties and obstacles: making independent cinema was becoming harder and harder.

SR: The events of 2020 were a turning point for Belarusian society. By that point you had already been living and working in Moscow for around twenty years. How did you, based in Russia, perceive the Belarusian protests? Did they alter your inner relationship to the place where you were born? Did they affect your identity as a writer?

VK: As far as my writerly identity goes – I still define myself as a Belarusian Russophone writer. Some people thought of me as a Russian writer because my books were appearing in Russia. But the context matters here. I left Belarus in 2000, a very harsh moment in political terms– political assassinations, the first mass wave of emigration, which by now is perhaps not much remembered. Any kind of creative work in Belarus was out of the question then: contemporary Belarusian literature either existed deep underground or appeared in tiny print runs – I wasn’t even aware of it. For me, leaving was a natural move. The short-lived period of cultural liberalisation came later,⁵ and out of it something developed, above all in literature. So my entire publishing history, until recently, until books started appearing with Belarusian publishers, has unfolded in Russia – but I never moved away from my Belarusianness, never disowned it. I consider myself a Belarusian Russophone writer.

In 2020 I was in Moscow, and I greeted those events with great enthusiasm and hope. I remembered that when I was living in Belarus in the late 1990s, with the authoritarian system already in place and the first attempts at protest, people were saying: if a hundred thousand come out into the streets, the regime won’t hold. That was happening in parallel with events in the former Yugoslavia, when the Milošević regime collapsed; I was there as a journalist during that revolution, in early October 2000, and the feeling was the same – that a critical mass of people would come out and the regime would be swept away. And in the summer of 2020, even before the elections, that feeling really did return.

In hindsight, I now know that Russia’s plans to attack Ukraine were in all likelihood already in place by then, and so no change of regime in Belarus would have been allowed, even if it had been brought about by mass protests. But you always want to keep faith in something, hold on to a certain romanticism – all the more so because for me this was an echo of what had happened just over twenty years earlier, when I was still living in Belarus. So yes, there was hope, there was enthusiasm. Later it became clear that all of this rested on a lack of information – but no one had that information.

SR: It is well known that you decided to leave Russia in 2022, openly condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Was that break a spontaneous decision in the first days of the war, or had an inner rejection been building for some time?

VK: The decision was made almost immediately. What I had observed in Russia over those twenty-odd years was a very gradual process, quite similar to what had happened in Belarus. It’s striking: in the second half of the 1990s I watched the same processes unfold in Belarus, and then – in a more drawn-out and more complicated form – they unfolded in Russia too. Eventually it reached the point of no return: the attack on Ukraine. It was clear that staying was no longer possible – for a whole range of reasons, both moral and personal, because under that kind of regime no one can feel safe.

I had lived under the Soviet system, but by then it was already falling apart, trying to reform itself during perestroika, so the feeling at that time was different. My youth, my teenage years, coincided with liberation, with an opening up – and twenty years later everything began moving in the opposite direction, only further, only worse.

SR: How has this forced emigration affected your creative identity? Was it difficult to start over in a European context?

VK: I went first to Istanbul, lived in Turkey for about a year, then moved to Germany. My move to Germany specifically has to do with family circumstances, the way things came together. I was able to come without going through asylum procedures and so on, and there’s a certain element of luck in that.

As for adapting: I’d moved to a foreign country in my fifties – not the age at which adapting comes easily. I have no illusions: I’ll never assimilate, I’ll never become part of this society. But the contemporary global world allows you – to a greater degree, probably, than several decades ago – to live in another country as an expat, without having to integrate fully. I’m essentially prepared for that.

It’s harder to find yourself in a situation where you have no country at all. You were born in the USSR – a bad country, of course, but one that was at least trying to reform itself. Nothing came of it; it collapsed. Then your country became Belarus, which again seemed to be heading in the right direction – until it wasn’t. Then there was Russia, at that point still a much freer country than the Belarus I’d left. But it too, unfortunately, set off down the same road. So there’s a particular sadness in finding yourself, to put it grandly, a person without a homeland, without a country he can call his own. But there it is.

SR: Once in Europe, you became one of the driving forces behind the Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network (BFN). The producer Leanid Kalitsenia, in a recent interview, said that the creation of the Microbudget Film Incubator in autumn 2023 was your idea – one that not everyone initially believed in. How did you manage to convince colleagues that, even under conditions of severe financial scarcity, it was possible to make feature films systematically?

VK: It’s all connected. I made my Belarusian film Summer of ’89 with Leanid Kalitsenia, and shortly after we finished he himself emigrated to Lithuania. He and I were discussing ways to promote Belarusian cinema, and those conversations eventually led us, together with Max Zhbankou,⁶ the well-known Belarusian film scholar and culturologist, to set up BFN.

I suggested the idea of a Microbudget Film Incubator straight away, drawing on my own experience: with today’s technology, making a film for a relatively small sum is entirely realistic. We were talking about figures of two and a half to three thousand dollars. The logic was this: it was an opportunity for Belarusian filmmakers to make a debut. Belarusian cinema had ended up in a very unfortunate position, even compared with the other former Soviet republics. That brief stretch of independence and freedom before Lukashenka came to power… I’ve thought a lot about why this happened, why things had gone differently elsewhere. In my view, it’s the human factor: there simply weren’t the people who, in that short window, managed to create something, to lay foundations. The recreation of the Soviet system in the early Lukashenka years would probably have destroyed everything anyway. But in some other spheres – not in cinema – a relatively independent culture did exist, and for quite some time. The idea was that Belarus had never had a proper independent film industry in which people could work and make films. So why not try to debut through a microbudget?

SR: The BFN Incubator manifestos describe microbudget cinema as a chance to ‘create the aesthetics and ideology of a new Belarusian cinema from scratch’. In selecting applications for the Incubator, you stressed that you were interested in auteur cinema and that any ‘angry, radical, or even subversive’ statements would be especially welcome. Do today’s young Belarusian filmmakers have enough of that creative anger?

VK: Maksim and I talked about wanting a correspondence between the microbudget production model and the aesthetic. We hoped a new aesthetic would emerge to match this microbudget – a kind of minimalism. We wanted something young, of course, radical, audacious. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I don’t know why. Three years on, I’m naturally still reflecting on it.

I’ve been somewhat disappointed by the lack of audacity among younger filmmakers. We can’t force them to make something radical and audacious. If they’re watching Netflix, the Hollywood mainstream, contemporary Russian cinema – yes, there’s an influence there. And then living in a fairly unfree society probably leaves its imprint as well. I can compare Belarus with Russia: in post-Soviet Russia, for a long time, there was no censorship over culture, and it developed more freely. That may have played a part, too. These are just my conjectures.

I’ve noticed that part of the Belarusian filmmaking community is fairly conformist and opportunistic. There’s a chance to make documentaries – we’ll make documentaries; a chance to shoot commercials – we’ll shoot commercials; a chance to work in television – we’ll work in television. While at heart, perhaps, they’d like to be making something else. Perhaps it’s tied to a wider system. Perhaps to do something audacious, you first have to pass through that system, the festival system, make a more digestible film, and only then… I don’t know.

At the same time, I’m glad we launched the project, and that the first film made within the Incubator made it into the Forum section at the Berlinale. The second film is now ready, and I hope it too will find some kind of trajectory. But to be candid, these films are a little different. They don’t correspond to my understanding of microbudget cinema.

SR: Yuri Semashko’s film The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov (2025), which went through the Incubator’s screenwriting lab, made it into the programme of the Berlin Film Festival. Did you expect such a major result from the very first cohort?

VK: There’s a less happy side to this, a disappointment of my own. I wasn’t able – and I consider this a personal failing – to ensure that the film was presented as Belarusian. I simply missed that moment in the process. The film had earlier taken part in a work-in-progress strand at the Cottbus festival,⁷ where it was listed as Belarusian-Lithuanian, because a Lithuanian co-producer had come on board and helped, through their studio, with post-production, colour grading, and sound. I had no concerns about that; it didn’t even occur to me that anything else was possible. I hope the director’s career will take shape, but it’s most likely to take shape for him as a Polish director: he’ll embed himself in the Polish film industry. And in five years or so, no one will remember that there was an independent Belarusian film in the Forum section at the Berlinale – because it was listed as Lithuanian-German: a German company also came on board for sound post-production.

Although objectively, of course, this is a major success: someone with no prior connection comes along, makes an independent film for a few thousand dollars from us, with minimal post-production support (no large sums were spent there – it was mostly help in kind), and ends up at the Berlinale. The microbudget idea worked. From the very beginning, I told people: we aren’t claiming you should only make films this way. There are different options. If you can secure a budget of half a million or a million euros within the European film industry – by all means, do it, we’ll be glad for you. If that option isn’t open to you, you can try another route. The fact that these projects have been brought to completion is itself impressive.

SR: Tell us briefly about your AI lab. What did it show?

VK: The world is moving on, technology is developing, and I was curious to see what artificial intelligence might offer a filmmaker. I look at this from the perspective of a director in emigration like me: with no access to money or to a film crew. Even Belarusian filmmakers are scattered across different cities, and getting people together is often difficult – logistically and financially. My question was this: can a director simply sit down at a computer, on her or his own, and use AI to make a feature that will look convincing – not laughable, not embarrassing? My conclusion is that, for now, no. The tools are there, they are developing, but you’d have to sit with them for years, and it isn’t free – video generation costs serious money. So, for now, this isn’t a solution that will help us in our situation.

I’m glad we ran the lab and tested the tools. The idea didn’t meet with much interest among Belarusian filmmakers. There’s a partly justified hostility towards artificial intelligence; I can understand it. But it’s the future all the same. Not that in five years all films will be made only with AI – I don’t believe that – but there should be different options. The world is changing; we have to make use of the new technology.

SR: Vladimir, in late April 2026 BFN announced changes to the structure of its board and to its membership, including your departure from the organisation. What was the main reason for such a step, especially now, at the peak of the Incubator’s success?

VK: This has to do with processes within the Belarusian filmmaking community. At first, there were three founders – myself, Leanid Kalitsenia, and Max Zhbankou. Then more people joined, and the BFN board took shape as the body that made decisions.

First, the Belarusian filmmaking emigration scene itself is changing. Three or four years ago, when we were starting out, people in emigration were still settling in: some had only just relocated, others had lived through their first year. There was a great need to rebuild ties, to socialise. By now all of that has happened. It isn’t a vast milieu – it’s a fairly limited community, and it isn’t being replenished: graduates of Belarusian creative universities aren’t moving here. So processes of transformation are taking place. BFN as it has existed in these years won’t exist any more; a transformation is underway. As Leanid Kalitsenia sees it, things will go in a somewhat different direction. How that will work out – I don’t know.

SR: What will happen now to the Microbudget Film Incubator?

VK: I still have commitments connected to the Microbudget Film Incubator: the film I mentioned, which we’re currently sending out to festivals, and the second cohort, which also has its winners. I don’t know exactly how all of this will be carried through in the end, but the commitments are there. So my leaving the board doesn’t mean the end of my obligations to the Incubator. I’ll do my best to see things through. As for what comes next, where the organisation will move and how well it will respond to the new conditions – we’ll see.

SR: If we turn to your personal horizons: where will you direct your creative energy now?

VK: After leaving Russia, I’ve found myself focusing on literature again. Back in 2023, an independent Russian publisher brought out my novel Vavilonia [Babylonia], a kind of chronicle of Russia as a nosediving bomber on the eve of the attack on Ukraine. Then opportunities arose to publish with various Belarusian émigré publishers. The novel Varshava (Warsaw) was reissued by Miane niama⁸ (I do not exist); last year Lohvinaŭ⁹ brought out a Belarusian translation of Gopniki; at the start of this year a collection of short stories appeared from Lysy Cherap¹⁰ (Bald Skull). And I’m now waiting for the publication – again from Miane niama – of the novel Yugo-Zapad (Southwest), a kind of sequel to Varshava. It’s the Belarus of the second half of the 1990s, the protagonist’s continuing coming-of-age against the backdrop of the consolidation of authoritarianism in the country. So in recent times I’ve been focused on what’s happening at BFN, and on literature.

Unfortunately, my view of the prospects for Russia and Belarus is fairly pessimistic. I’d be glad to be wrong, but Belarusian cinema in exile will probably move in the direction of being absorbed into the film industries of other countries. This has been discussed before; there’s nothing new about it: people connected to the Belarusian filmmaking community have long been saying that today Belarusian cinema is cinema made in other countries by directors who happen to come from Belarus. Through our microbudget projects I tried to push back against this in some way: insisting that this is still Belarusian cinema, that it’s shot either in Belarus, or with a fully Belarusian crew, or financed by a Belarusian organisation. But I understand that people want to work in the established film industries, that they want to earn a living.

So if anyone asks me, my recommendation to a young woman director, a young man director, is this: if you have the chance to make a microbudget feature debut – within our project or any other – try it. It’s a unique experience. You’ll have the chance to make the film you want, with no producer’s diktat. There will be financial constraints, but it may well turn out to be your one and only film with full creative freedom – even if you go on to a wonderful career afterwards. And if you want to work in a fully-fledged film industry and earn a living – then embedding yourself in another country’s industry, through a film school. It’s a difficult game, but try it that way. Will it be possible to call that cinema Belarusian? It’s a complicated question. But we’ll see.

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

Bio

Vladimir Kozlov is a Belarusian writer and filmmaker based in Germany. Born in Mahilioŭ in 1972, he lived in Moscow from 2000 to 2022 before leaving Russia in protest at the invasion of Ukraine. His debut novel Gopniki (Ad Marginem, 2002) was named Ex Libris’s prose book of the year and established him as a chronicler of the post-Soviet provincial street; his subsequent fiction has been translated into English, French, Serbian, and Slovak. As a director, he has made several independent microbudget features, including Desiatka (2013), which won the Bronze "Flowers of Taiga Hope" prize at the Spirit of Fire festival, and Anomie (2016), which received a special mention at the Warsaw Film Festival. His screenplay for Summer of : ’89 shared the Chyrvony Veras (Red Heather) prize in 2024. In 2022 he co-founded the Belarusian Filmmakers’ Network (BFN) with Leanid Kalitsenia and Max Zhbankou, and in 2023 he launched its Microbudget Film Incubator, whose first graduate, Yuri Semashko's The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov, premiered in the Forum section of the Berlinale in 2025. Recent novels include Vavilonia (2023) and the forthcoming Yugo-Zapad.

Sasha Razor is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, United States, specialising in East 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.

Filmography

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2013. Desiatka / Number Ten. Platzkart Productions.

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2014. Sledy na snegu / Traces in the Snow. Platzkart Productions.

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2015. Kozha / Skin. Platzkart Productions.

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2016. Anomiia / Anomie. Platzkart Productions.

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2019. Kak my zakhotim / As We Want It. Platzkart Productions.

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2020. Tri tovarishcha / Three Comrades. Platzkart Productions.

Kozlov, Vladimir. 2022. [Leta ’89] / Leto ’89 / Summer of ’89. Running Turtle.

Semashko, Yuri. 2025. Lebiadzinaia pesnia Fiodara Ozerava / The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov. Artbox /Shoot’n’Post / Belarusian Filmmakers Network / Singo.

Suggested citation

Razor, Sasha. 2026. “Making Films Without a Country: Vladimir Kozlov on the Microbudget Film Incubator”. 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.2026.00022.434.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms.