Please join the Fletcher Eurasia Club and Tufts Amnesty International for a film screening of Minsk (2022), the first narrative movie about the Belarusian protests in 2020. The presentation will be followed by a conversation with one of the film’s producers, Vitali Shkliarov, a former Belarusian political prisoner, an expert in U.S.-Russian relations, an award-winning political strategist, and a campaign manager. Please make sure to register via myFletcher to participate in the event in person.

The first narrative movie about Belarusian protests in August 2020, Minsk, was shot in Tallinn. The single-take film tells a story of a young married couple, Yulia and Pasha, living in the Minsk suburbs. They had just got married, bought an apartment on credit, and were planning to have a baby, but they accidentally got in the middle of the protesters. An ordinary walk turns into hell as innocent people become victims of police brutality. This film was created without any editing cuts. Minsk is the fourth full-length film written and directed by Boris Guts. Vitali Shkliarov, one of the film’s producers, had lived through the depicted events himself. Vitali was arrested in Belarus in 2020, spent four months in jail and, like many other political prisoners in Belarus, was tortured during that time. Minsk has a vital mission, to tell the truth about what happened in the capital of Belarus in August 2020 despite all prohibitions and attempts to cover it up on the state level.

Vitali Shkliarov is a former Harvard University visiting scholar, columnist, and award-winning political strategist with extensive experience in foreign policy and international elections, grassroots campaigns. Book author and a former political prisoner, an expert in U.S.-European affairs, Belarusian and Ukrainian domestic politics, and Russian influence abroad, he is known as a senior advisor to many opposition presidential candidates in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. An activist and co-architect of the first ever “political Uber”, a no-cost political incubator for running for office, he currently lives in Kyiv and has also worked on both Barack Obama’s and Bernie Sander’s presidential campaigns. Vitali won 12 American Association of Political Consultants POLLIE awards, the highest prize for political work and activism. For his work, he has been profiled by The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, The Economist, The Intercept, Politico, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, NBC, and others.