22/12/2025

Mara Tamkovich Wins the 9th Krzysztof Krauze Award

This year’s Krzysztof Krauze Award has been presented to Mara Tamkovich “for an uncompromising portrait of a marriage resisting totalitarian oppression. A complete and mature work in which the director, with a profound sense of responsibility, ruthlessly examines the truth of human bonds and the strength of devotion.”

The jury, composed of Olga Chajdas, Klara Kochańska, Borys Lankosz and Jakub Piątek, honored the filmmaker for her debut feature Under the Grey Sky.

Under the Grey Sky by Mara Tamkovich is a film inspired by the story of a married couple of Belarusian journalists, Igor Ilyash and Katsiaryna Andreyeva, who was arrested in November 2020. Belarus is in turmoil, with protests erupting after the presidential election rigged by Lukashenko. Anti-regime journalist Lena is livestreaming the brutal pacification of a peaceful demonstration. She is detected by a police drone, yet continues her broadcast. She is arrested. Lena’s husband Ilja prepares for them to leave the country as soon as she is released from detention. The regime, however, has no intention of letting her go. The authorities are determined to break them both.

The film, for which Tamkovich received a nomination for the European Film Awards, and which earlier won the award for Best Directorial Debut or Second Film at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia as well as the Grand Prize at the Young and Film Festival in Koszalin, avoids “journalistic simplifications and traces of political fever. Mara Tamkovich’s debut feature is above all a story about love and the price one must pay for freedom. Beautiful and sad at the same time,” wrote Bartosz Staszczyszyn in his review for culture.pl.

Lena (Aliaksandra Vaitsekhovic), a journalist in her early thirties, together with her camera operator (Palina Chabatarova), broadcasts from the balcony of an apartment the intervention of uniformed services during a public protest in Minsk. Their online stream gains more and more viewers with every passing minute. Dozens, hundreds of thousands. Suddenly, a security drone flies past Lena’s camera, attempting to pinpoint the source of the transmission. Moments later, loud footsteps of masked officers echo through the stairwell and doors to successive apartments are being battered down. “The excellent, suspenseful opening sequence of the film is only a prelude to a story about the ruthlessness of a political regime that brutally crushes those who have the courage to think and dream of a better life,” writes Staszczyszyn.

“After this film I began to think differently about freedom. It is like a report from a Belarusian horror story. Attentive festival observers may already know this dynamic opening, as it echoes Tamkovich’s previous Gdynia work, the short film Live from 2022. In her latest work the director condenses that into just a few scenes and focuses on what happened afterwards, once the police arrested the journalists,” we read in a text by Przemysław Gulda in Gazeta Wyborczapublished after the film’s Gdynia premiere.

This story happened in real life, and its protagonist, journalist Katsiaryna Andreyeva, is serving an eight-year prison sentence. In the film, our guide through the Belarusian reality, where a two-day detention can turn into eight years in a penal colony, where lawyers abandon their clients out of fear of political revenge, and where the tentacles of the security services wrap around everything and everyone, is Ilja (Valentin Novopolski), Lena’s husband.

“In Tamkovich’s film, mindless violence does not have a single face, because in Under the Grey Sky the director does not create a classic antagonist who would personify the brutal regime. Its presence and power are dispersed. The cogs of the political machine are masked riot police officers, judges handing down sentences ordered by the authorities, and compliant informers or officials who are, after all, only following orders,” writes Staszczyszyn. “But it is not political commentary that drives Tamkovich’s film. Under the Grey Sky is above all a moving melodrama, a story about a love that has no price and that forces compromises. In the drama written for the characters of Ilja and Lena, the director poses fundamental questions. Is it a person’s duty to fight for freedom? Or is individual resistance meaningless? Can one sacrifice love in the name of political struggle? Is that not a kind of betrayal?

Tamkovich does not shy away from difficult recognitions, for example when she shows that behind the heroic fight against the regime there is also a selfish need for heroism, and that the hunger for recognition and fame not only does not negate idealism but is in fact an inseparable part of it.”

“Tamkovich places her camera elsewhere, not in the prison cell but in the home where the journalist’s husband remains. This is an intriguing reversal of the cultural model repeated for decades, in which the woman waits for the fighting and imprisoned man.

The protagonist fights for his wife as best he can. He tries to find out anything, to arrange something, tossing between a lawyer’s office and the prison visiting room,” writes Przemysław Gulda. “And the heroine herself faces an enormous dilemma. Should she betray her ideals, turn away from the cause she fought for, in order to receive a lighter sentence? The director finds a very interesting way to tell this. A way that brings Under the Grey Sky very close to the Polish classic tradition of the cinema of moral anxiety.

Tamkovich’s film is very modest, almost minimalist in formal terms. There are no embellishments, no fireworks, no effects. The director consistently restrains any desire for staging spectacle, maintaining a reportage tone close to documentary. This is especially clear when archival footage from Belsat television and from the real court trial appears during the end credits. They differ very little from the scenes in the film.

Such a form, reminiscent of early films by Kieślowski, allows the viewer to focus on the events and the characters of this drama. The audience may feel as if they are pushing their way together with the protagonists through a truly Kafkaesque labyrinth of a totalitarian judicial system.

Seen in Poland, Tamkovich’s film makes one think differently about freedom and about the fact that here one can freely say what one wants and that such films can be made here. For these two reasons, this is a very important film,” Gulda concludes.

The text quotes fragments from “After this film I began to think differently about freedom. It is like a report from a Belarusian horror story” by Przemysław Gulda, Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 September 2024, and from “Under the Grey Sky,” directed by Mara Tamkovich, Bartosz Staszczyszyn, culture.pl, 10 October 2022.