Mara Tamkovich

Born on 29 September 1988 in Minsk, Mara Tamkovich is one of the most distinctive voices of the new generation of Polish cinema. A Polish-Belarusian director, screenwriter and former journalist, from the very beginning of her career she has consistently created films that are deeply rooted in reality while consciously reaching beyond the realm of journalism. As she herself emphasises, she is not interested in reconstructing facts, but in “emotional truth” — the experience of a human being confronted with an extreme situation. It was precisely this approach that made her feature debut, “Under the Grey Sky”, one of the most significant Polish debuts of recent years.

At the age of seventeen, she left Belarus for Poland. She studied journalism at the University of Warsaw and later enrolled at the Warsaw Film School, where she studied directing. She further developed her education by completing a directing course at the Wajda School.

For nearly ten years, she worked as a journalist for independent Belarusian media broadcasting from Poland, primarily Belsat TV. This experience — growing up in the family of an opposition journalist, taking part in protests against the regime as a teenager, and spending many years working as a reporter — shaped both her worldview and her later filmmaking. As she has said, cinema became her response to the sense of helplessness she felt in the face of events unfolding in her homeland, although she never intended it to become a form of activism. “It is, after all, a film — a work of art. I hope that beyond telling the story of the tragedy unfolding in Belarus, Under the Grey Sky also has a reflective, artistic and more universal value,” she said.

At just thirty-eight, Tamkovich has already built an impressive body of work. She has received more than twenty awards at festivals in Poland and abroad, including the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival for her short film Live, the Award for Best Directorial Debut at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, the Grand Jantar at the Koszalin Debut Film Festival “Youth and Film”, the Krzysztof Krauze Award presented by the Polish Directors’ Guild, the Script Fiesta Grand Prize for the screenplay of Under the Grey Sky, as well as a nomination for the European Film Award in the European Discovery – Prix FIPRESCI category. Her feature debut had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival in New York, opening the door to an international career. She is a member of the Polish Directors’ Guild, the European Film Academy and the Belarusian Independent Film Academy.

Tamkovich developed her distinctive cinematic language at the Warsaw Film School. Her first student film, “The Other Side of the Door” (2014), based on true events, told the story of a young man who retreats into the world of computer games and online isolation after a personal failure.

Her next student film, “Equation” (2015), also inspired by real events, told the story of a mathematics teacher who subordinates her entire life to a rigid system of rules. Already here, a theme emerges that would recur in almost all of Tamkovich’s later films: the individual trapped by a system of values or a social mechanism that, instead of providing order, becomes a source of violence.

Her graduation film, “The Daughter” (2017), launched Tamkovich onto the international festival circuit. Its starting point is the tragedy of a sixteen-year-old girl who is raped at a party, but the director is primarily interested in what happens afterwards. Rather than focusing on the violence itself, she tells the story of the relationship between a father and daughter, and of a society and institutions incapable of providing the victim with either justice or support. At the centre of the film are the mechanisms of taboo, stereotypes and the secondary victimisation of a person who has suffered abuse. As film critics noted, “The Daughter” was made with very simple means but with a strong social and realist sensibility, becoming a particularly timely voice during the international debate sparked by the MeToo movement.

“The Daughter” also anticipates all the most important characteristics of Mara Tamkovich’s later cinema. The director does not build the film around the crime itself or its perpetrator. She is far more interested in a person left alone with trauma and confronted by a system that fails them. It is here that the themes of institutional helplessness, moral choices and responsibility for another human being emerge so clearly for the first time — themes that she would develop several years later in her feature debut, “Under the Grey Sky”.

A decisive stage in Tamkovich’s artistic development came at the Wajda School. It was there that she made the short film “Live” (2022), inspired by the story of Belsat TV journalists Katsiaryna Andreyeva and Daria Chultsova, who were arrested while broadcasting peaceful protests in Minsk. Incorporating authentic footage from their live transmission, the film received more than twenty awards at festivals in Poland and abroad, including the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Significantly, Tamkovich did not initially plan to develop the story into a feature-length film. As she later recalled, “Live” was a story about the moment of protest — about energy, agency and a sense of community. Only in the years that followed, with new sentences handed down to Katsiaryna Andreyeva and the growing awareness that the tragedy was only beginning, did Under the Grey Sky take shape. “The short film was a response to what was happening at the time. Under the Grey Sky is an answer to the question: what happened next?” she explained in interviews.

Developing the story that began in “Live”, the director shows what happens when the cameras stop broadcasting and the protagonists are left alone with the consequences of their decisions.

The story begins during the protests following the rigged 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Lena, an independent journalist, broadcasts the brutal suppression of a peaceful demonstration. She is tracked down by a police drone and arrested. Once she is imprisoned, the film’s focus shifts to her husband, Ilja, who struggles to navigate a reality in which the rule of law has ceased to exist and every decision entails a moral compromise.

Tamkovich does not tell the story of a heroine fighting a dictatorship. In one interview, the director admitted that her primary inspiration was Igor Ilyash and the dramatic choices he faced. As she explained, those choices were not driven by politics, but by love and responsibility for another person. “What matters more: physically getting your wife back, or getting back a partner who has preserved her identity, even if you are only reunited years later?” This question became the central axis of the film.

Although “Under the Grey Sky” refers to a real political situation, Tamkovich consistently rejects journalistic or overtly political filmmaking. “My goal was not to recreate events chronologically, but to capture the emotional truth and the process the characters go through,” she explained. She was equally determined to avoid turning her characters into heroes. She has said that she did everything possible to strip the most heroic moments of the true story of their heroism and to avoid sentimentality. She wanted the characters to remain ordinary people, full of doubts, rather than monumental symbols of resistance.

Critics were almost unanimous in emphasising that the film’s greatest strength lies not in its political subject matter, but in its humanistic dimension. Writing for Culture.pl, Bartosz Staszczyszyn observed that “Under the Grey Sky” contains “none of the journalistic simplifications or traces of political fever”, because it is “above all, a story about love and the price one must pay for freedom. Beautiful and sad at the same time.” He also noted that the director does not create a conventional antagonist embodying the evil of the system — violence is dispersed among officials, judges, police officers and anonymous executors of orders. As a result, the regime is not represented by a single individual, but by a mechanism permeating the whole of society.

Even more important are the questions that, according to the critic, Tamkovich poses to her characters and her audience: Is it a person’s duty to fight for freedom? Can love be sacrificed for a political cause? And does abandoning one’s convictions truly make it possible to save oneself? Rather than offering simple answers, the director leaves the viewer in a space of moral ambiguity.

Przemysław Gulda of “Gazeta Wyborcza” daily offered a similar reading of the film, describing “Under the Grey Sky” as resembling “a report from the Belarusian nightmare” while at the same time remaining close to the tradition of Polish Cinema of Moral Anxiety. He noted that Tamkovich moves the camera from the prison cell to the apartment left behind by the imprisoned protagonist, making the separated married couple the emotional centre of the story. The film’s minimalist form, journalistic restraint and rejection of spectacle give the characters’ drama a universal dimension that reaches far beyond the contemporary history of Belarus.

The film’s international journey confirmed its universal resonance. It had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival in New York and subsequently won the Award for Best Directorial Debut at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, the Grand Jantar at the “Youth and Film” Festival, the festival’s Journalists’ Award, the Grand Prix of the Lublin Film Festival, the Golden Angel at Tofifest, the main award in Tel Aviv, a distinction in Turin, and a nomination for the European Film Award in the European Discovery – Prix FIPRESCI category. Mara Tamkovich’s screenplay was also awarded at Script Fiesta, while the director herself received the Krzysztof Krauze Award and was named an Empik Discovery.

Tamkovich herself, however, remains sceptical of the belief that cinema can change the world. She feels close to Wojciech Marczewski’s words that “cinema does not change the world, but it can change people.” As she elaborated in one interview: “I believe that cinema builds bridges and allows us to understand one another better. (…) Cinema has a great deal of room for nuance and complexity. In a sense, it is an antidote to simplification.”