ZAVTRA

Outside in the Belarusian winter, the new housing estates next to the statues from socialist times are reaching heavenwards, while the jubilant news about the government and its relations to the EU is blaring from the television set in the apartment. Yuliya Shatun’s TOMORROW centres on life in Masyr, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, which is both the birthplace of the director and home to her parents who play the lead roles in the film. Working without a budget, the director has crafted a semi-documentary film that reports relentlessly on the challenges of everyday life in Belarus. She uses the camera, initially focusing on the snow-covered vastness by the roadside and panning over other snow-covered tower blocks to concentrate on her protagonists’ laconic struggle for survival. Much as they have stoically adapted themselves to a life full of suffocating shame – a great humanism comes to light in the sense hopelessness and biting irony that occasionally turns into icy cynicism. RB