Filmotor Takes World Sales on Belarus Documentary 'Letters From the Silenced Country,' Headed to Venice
Filmotor has acquired world sales rights for "Letters From the Silenced Country," a partly animated documentary by Belarusian writer-director Andrei Kutsila, ahead of its world premiere at the 83rd Venice Film Festival (Variety).
The film screens in the Venice Open — Out of Competition section, a programme that sits outside the main competition but still commands the Lido's biggest crowds. It runs roughly 72 minutes, is spoken in Belarusian, and is a co-production of Poland, Germany and Lithuania (La Biennale schedule). The Venice festival lists it under its Polish title "Listy" alongside the international title (La Biennale).
Kutsila's film portrays contemporary Belarus through the stories of individuals who endured imprisonment, repression and exile. Following the peaceful protests that swept the country in 2020, the regime's violent crackdown left many dead, injured, imprisoned or forced to flee. The war in Ukraine then triggered anti-war resistance inside Belarus — and even harsher repression in response, making public dissent nearly impossible. In that climate, letters became one of the few remaining connections between political prisoners and the outside world (Variety).
For Kutsila, the subject is personal. A Belarusian documentary filmmaker now based in Poland, he was forced to leave Belarus after the 2020 protests and settled abroad, later continuing his artistic development through an internship at the Łódź Film School (Variety).
His track record in documentary is extensive. His 2018 film "Summa" won the IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary — IDFA being the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, one of the world's premier non-fiction showcases — and went on to win the Silver Hobby-Horse for Best Documentary in the National Competition at the Krakow Film Festival in 2019. His 2021 documentary "When Flowers Are Not Silent" received the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Warsaw Film Festival. His work has also screened at DOK Leipzig and Hot Docs (Variety).
On the production side, the film's producer Mirosław Dembiński is president of the DocEdu Foundation. Dembiński directed the film "Lesson of Belarusian" roughly two decades before "Letters From the Silenced Country" entered production, giving the new project a long historical lens on the same country (Variety).
Filmotor, the sales company behind the deal, is led by founder and sales-and-festivals executive Michaela Čajková (Variety). The company's distribution arm is visible on Instagram at @filmotor_distribution (Instagram).
World sales rights deals matter because they determine which distributor buys the film for each territory — the link between a festival premiere and the film reaching cinemas or platforms in a given country. A Venice premiere gives a sales agent a high-profile launch platform; from here, Filmotor will pitch the film to buyers from territories worldwide.
The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs as part of Biennale Cinema 2026 (La Biennale).
