MOTHERLAND

An autocratic system of violence is destroying the individual, the “self” in Belarus.

When Filmmaker/Journalist Hanna Badziaka and Filmmaker/Former Soldier Alexander Mihalkovich began to unravel the long-term consequences of autocratic and institutional violence within the Belarus military, they found themselves returning to a central question:  could the hierarchal cycle of an embedded military system that uses violence as a weapon against its own recruits be broken? A torturously perverse form of initiation, with roots in the traditions of the Soviet Army and originally implemented by recruited ex-convicts who brought criminal rules into the military, has released a culture of violence out onto the streets of Belarus: After serving their mandated military service, soldiers return to civilian life broken, if they haven’t died first at the hands of their commanding officers.

In MOTHERLAND, three unique perspectives emerge from the culture of violence to shatter the cycle: the Mothers, the Soldiers, and the Activists. Confronting the concepts of responsibility, fear, loss, and sorrow as they search for the cycle’s starting point, Badziaka and Mihalkovich call for the sun to set on this vestige of the Soviet era as they hold a mirror to our world most of us would rather not see.