Nikita Lavretski. Photo by Christopher Small.
By his own count, Belarusian filmmaker Nikita Lavretski has released eight multimedia works this year: three mid- or feature-length films, one TikTok series, two stand-up specials, a short, and A Kid’s Flick, first screened at festivals at the end of 2021 but which he released online in 2022. It’s an astonishingly prodigious run even for a filmmaker well known—if known at all—for the speed and quantity of his output. Jokes About War and A Date in Minsk, the best of the bunch, played at Doclisboa last month, only a year after A Kid’s Flick had its world premiere at the same festival.
Without a doubt, I count these films among the most significant and audacious of the year, though perhaps as much for personal as for cinematic reasons. Jokes About War was one of the first films of any kind released about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, taking images of schlubby Belarusian avant-garde comedian Alexey Sukhanok’s stand-up routines, ripped from Instagram and Telegram, and interpolating them with warped, digitally distended images of bombs raining down on Ukrainian land, captured Russian soldiers forced onto their knees, and splintering residential buildings scarred and disembowelled by Russian mortar blasts. It appeared on YouTube in March 2022, some weeks after Lavretski started piecing it together in the Russian city of Khanty-Mansiysk, stuck in a hotel room quarantined with COVID at the film festival Spirit of Fire, which was interrupted by the onset of war. I had fled that city myself only days before, taking the last flight home to Prague once Russia started raining bombs down on Ukrainian cities.
Lavretski’s other new film, in which he also stars as in many of his other works, is an altogether more old-fashioned kind of wartime portrait, as much a document of an historical event as its more aggressively of-the-moment counterpart. A snapshot of a Minsk that probably no longer exists, A Date in Minsk consists entirely of a bravura continuous shot lasting more than 80 minutes and capturing a Tinder date in real time, from the initial awkwardness of uncertain verbal prods to the denouement of a more unfulfilled kind of awkwardness, as Lavretski’s character uncomfortably and flailingly tries to force a connection with his would-be partner.
Altogether, it’s close to something like The Mortal Storm (1940), in which characters in love act dignified as the world goes to pieces all around them. The detritus all around the protagonists, here as in Frank Borzage’s film, turns out to be but a prelude to an even more fatal storm taking shape on the horizon. In place of James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, here it’s Nikita and Volha Kavaliova, Lavretski’s partner and most important collaborator, who play versions of themselves meeting for the first time. This one I first saw privately after meeting Lavretski in Lisbon last year; twelve months passed before it premiered, a suspended anticipation that lasted through our shared moments in a Russia that no longer exists. Once it finally showed at Doclisboa, in an International Competition which it went on to win, A Date in Minsk unexpectedly seemed to speak to a new context altogether.
One year after we first met and back in the Portuguese capital, Nikita and I had a chance to see both films, Jokes About War and A Date in Minsk, on the big screen for the first time. Our conversation was long, breezy, and naturally full of goofing. We spoke about what exactly it means to make a Nikita Lavretski movie, the ideal working week for a filmmaker, and a good deal about Gucci Mane and Young Thug.
A Date in Minsk.
NIKITA LAVRETSKI: What kind of phone are you recording this on?
NOTEBOOK: iPhone.
LAVRETSKI: Is that an iPhone? OK, I don’t know how to use an iPhone—I’ve never had one.
NOTEBOOK: Isn’t A Date in Minsk shot on an iPhone?
LAVRETSKI: It was, yes. But that’s why I had to ask Yulia [Shatun] to shoot it. She bought a new iPhone, so I saved some production money by collaborating with her. Well, also I asked her because she’s a great filmmaker—but also, if I’m being completely truthful, her access to the camera that goes by the name iPhone 13 was also an argument for collaborating with her. [laughs] She has the camera. That’s already good. I don’t have such a camera.
NOTEBOOK: You said you wanted to make a date film like this for years.
LAVRETSKI: That’s true. I wanted to make a first date film since 2013. I actually made a prototype with some of my friends; I set them up to have a date. But they didn’t have any chemistry. I also recorded the sound very badly. But the footage is there. I guess it is unreleasable. It shot in one take, like A Date in Minsk, but just a static camera. Maybe it will be released on the inevitable Criterion Collection Blu-ray of A Date in Minsk. Though I guess even they wouldn’t include this as a special feature. The movie itself is barely releasable. And the earlier version is whole magnitude less releasable than the new film.
NOTEBOOK: At what point did A Date in Minsk start to look like A Date in Minsk then? A single, moving take through the pool hall and the streets; you and Volha Kavaliova playing some version of yourselves.
LAVRETSKI: This whole movie is like a diss track. I’m living in the realm of hip-hop. That’s why I release so many movies. This year I released—well, I’ve lost count. Maybe five? The Bear’s Lair, Jokes About War, the online release of A Kid’s Flick, My Poopfriend. And also The Murder on Alibegova Street, which will be released on TikTok and YouTube. And A Date in Minsk. I’m like Gucci Mane or Lil’ Wayne at the height of their powers. I am just releasing street mixtapes to stay visible. And so A Date in Minsk is kind of a diss track to Boris Guts. He made a movie called Minsk (2022), which is also shot in one take. So I thought, “No, I’m going to make the real single take Minsk film.”
NOTEBOOK: That’s the one you explicitly call out in A Date in Minsk.
LAVRETSKI: That’s the whole point of a diss track. You have to mention your opponent or enemy. It’s not really a diss track if it’s subtle. It’s also a hip-hop approach: to explicitly say what you mean. The trigger for the movie then was the announcement of Boris Guts’ movie Minsk, shot in Tallinn. Plus I had asked so many people over the years about doing a first date movie. I asked all my friends to be in one. But it is a risky move. You have to be willing to put yourself out there. You have to be an artist, I guess, to consider recording a first date you are involved in or allowing it to be put in a movie. Every time I heard that one of my friends had broken up with their boyfriend or girlfriend I would say to them, “Well, that’s great news. I have the perfect proposition for you.” [laughs] I never let go of the concept; I was obsessive. At some point, I thought, well, I can go on a first date myself. But if I go on a Tinder date, it wouldn’t be very romantic because I’m with Volha. So, the only option is to go on a date with Volha and play some version of ourselves. It’s very logical when you think about it. All the elements of the movie were developed out of necessity. And about shooting on an iPhone, well, we shot in a real billiards hall in Minsk. And people in Belarus can be afraid of cameras. We could easily have been thrown out—we didn’t ask for permission to film and, if we had, they would almost certainly have refused it. So, an iPhone and selfie stick worked.
NOTEBOOK: And so, it was important that the camera was moving. Because if it was like the earlier date movie, you would’ve had to stay in the billiards hall.
LAVRETSKI: Yes, I thought it would be nice to show the real Minsk. That’s the diss track aspect of it. This movie can no longer stay in the billiards hall, because this you can shoot in Tallinn or wherever. Why not show the cold courtyards or Yakub Kolas Square. I once wrote an article about Minsk called “Minsk, a toy city”—having been rebuilt after the Second World War, it’s really more like a model of a city than an actual city.
A Date in Minsk.
NOTEBOOK: But there was just one attempt at capturing this take.
LAVRETSKI: Yeah, yeah.
NOTEBOOK: You didn’t try it over three nights or something like that.
LAVRETSKI: No, no. This is the only take. I mean I don’t think it would work as another take because all the chemistry and playfulness and excitement me and Volha have about doing this psycho-dramatic experiment would be gone. But maybe I'm wrong. But I was also too lazy to do it another time. Gucci Mane, after all, records all of his verses in one take.
NOTEBOOK: The film is incredibly well structured, considering that you only did one take. I also assumed that you had done a number of takes over a number of evenings. Having seen it before in a different context, I started to get anxious that you or Volha or Yulia wouldn't hit the marks that I had assumed that you had laid out. Since I was imagining that you had established certain things that you needed to hit, I started to see when you were playing pool, for example, that it's taking too long. Or that you start the new game. And if the new game was as long as the first game, then you would never leave the pool hall.
LAVRETSKI: I knew that only a bit more than half of the movie should take place in the pool hall, because I estimated that the walk would take maybe 30 minutes, since we had to make stops along the way. If you remember at the end of the second game, I ended it by hitting the black ball into the pocket, almost jokingly. That’s why I kind of did that on purpose, to move things along.
NOTEBOOK: You mean that you had your eye on the clock?
LAVRETSKI: No, I was... [Server comes to the table. Nikita leans into microphone.] We are eating crepes. I think it's a very nice when you read an interview with, say, Scarlett Johansson from the beginning of the 2000s. And it's like, “And then she lit up her third Marlboro Red.” When I read that, I’m thinking, wow, she's a heavy smoker.
NOTEBOOK: When did you shoot this movie?
LAVRETSKI: I shot it in October 2021. End of September, beginning of October.
NOTEBOOK: I first saw it at the end of that October. It was a bit of a painful experience watching the film again here at Doclisboa. Seeing all these things that really meant nothing to me previously, including the Ukrainian scarf that you wear. And seeing it, I realized that this chasm of time separated those two epochs—shooting and premiere.
LAVRETSKI: And Volha shouts, “glory to Ukraine,” when we’re in the streets, yeah. I don't know why she did that. It was kind of a dangerous thing to shout in the streets of Minsk. She also shouted Kto ne skachet tot Moskal! ["Whoever does not jump is a Muscovite!"], which is an anti-Russian slogan from Ukraine. I wouldn't say that the war in Ukraine didn't matter for us in 2021. It's also mattered. Volha lived for couple of months in Ukraine in 2021. And she went again for a couple of months after the shoot. Indeed, she had been staying in Ukraine at the start of this year and left just in the first days of February. And my brother at that time lived in Ukraine and he had to flee the country after the full-scale invasion.
[Coffee arrives.] They brought me a coffee: An Americano coffee. You can write in the interview, “Nikita chugged the coffee because he’s a coffee maniac.” Ah, it’s very hard to chug. It's extremely hot… Anyway, for me—since I have friends in Ukraine or Ukrainian friends elsewhere, the war was already going on at that point. As for Minsk itself, as I said in the film, there's this duality—the streets are quiet, all the cafes and hipster craft beer bars are working, and people are having fun. You can just live your life and it’s fine. But after the 2020 rebellion, a lot of people went to prison and that’s there, lurking behind everything. When I think what was the state of Minsk in that moment we shot the film, it’s not so easy to be precise about—there are obviously many sides to it. And I don't even know which side is the real one. What’s happening on the surface and what's happening beneath the surface in Minsk—it's almost Lynchian in that respect. We have this life but then there are, like I said, demons in the corner of your vision. But equally, I don't think Lynch says that the nice side of his films or of life in general is not real. He just says that both the darkness and the light are, like, equally real. Mulholland Dr.: it's up for interpretation which is the real version of the story. The Hollywood dream version, or the depressing version. Or maybe like it depends on your mood: if you're a dark person, you would obviously say that he is deconstructing the very nice, ‘50s idealist American Dream and saying that it was really rotten at the core. But another, more upbeat person might say, “No, he's showing the nice thing to give us hope for the future.”
Jokes About War.
NOTEBOOK: Well, that’s also true about Jokes About War, your other film showing at Doclisboa this year. You said in the Q&A that you would be very interested in seeing Russian Tinder dates now, Ukrainian Tinder dates now—what that would look like.
LAVRETSKI: I started making Jokes About War when I was in isolation in Khanty-Mansiysk in Siberia, with COVID, while attending a film festival amidst the outbreak of war. That’s where I had the idea. So yeah, even that was similar in feeling.
NOTEBOOK: In that film you're challenging yourself to imagine what stand-up comedy or really any kind of goofiness or plain acting stupid could be like in this context, the context of war. Just what it looks like for these two images—war, stand-up—to exist alongside each other.
LAVRETSKI: I didn't have to imagine it. That is literally what I saw when I was looking on my Instagram feed when I was in Khanty-Mansiysk—Alexey's jokes and then the next story would be some explosion in Ukraine. I didn't create this point of contrast, this juxtaposition; it already existed on my Insta feed. I made this film basically by subscribing to Alexey Suhanok. I thought, wow, there's this material, but he probably won't be able to perform it anytime in person in the future. We should make a stand-up special. I also try, in the film, to capture the war itself and these war images as a context, a background against which the jokes are playing. Because maybe today it's not entirely lost [yet], but in like three years these specific images and sounds and online sensations will likely be lost completely. Plus, stand-up comedians are really the frontline of making sense of the world. At the end of the day, art does sooner or later try to conquer reality; stand-up comedians are often the first to attempt to do it. But even if, like Alexey's efforts or attempts, may not be to everyone's liking, they are still respectable in the sense that he is actually doing it amidst the war. There is this Ukrainian comedian Felix Redka who recorded a stand-up special (1) in the bomb shelter in Sumy that's on YouTube. It's very popular.
NOTEBOOK: Alexei’s co-credited on the film as director. How were you working together?
LAVRETSKI: He’s credited in the sense that he created all this visual material—these videos and stories. I think that's already directing. The creators of Instagram stories and TikTok videos are creating cinema, after all. So yeah, then I just worked from there. I believe in mistakes—finding rationalizations in the mistakes of a film, like the long, barely-lit sections of A Date in Minsk, which I didn’t plan for but which, for example, you spoke about in a very interesting way to me earlier. I believe in the cinema of mistakes, including the Mistakist Declaration by Harmony Korine.(2) Have you heard about that one? Maybe Korine was doing a parody of Dogma 95 or something because it was at the end of the ‘90s. He also did a Dogme film, Julien Donkey Boy, and he wrote this manifesto, about how you should make as many mistakes in your movies as possible. That's basically the idea.
NOTEBOOK: There’s this line from Raúl Ruiz, from Poetics of Cinema, in which he said that when he went to film school, he was taught that all the films he liked were badly made.
LAVRETSKI: Yeah, that happens a lot to me and my taste, so I can relate to that. I'm sure the darkness in A Date in Minsk will continue to stimulate the audience’s imaginations. But it's not all bad—it’s not that dark. There are still some scenes of Minsk that are lit in the film. Oh! This is the title of the interview: This movie is not lit, but it is lit.
Jokes About War.
NOTEBOOK: Maybe we can talk about how you work as a filmmaker, since you produce so many films. I remember you said before that one shouldn't work more than 8 hours in a week, but I guess that doesn't count filmmaking, right?
LAVRETSKI: I mean I filmed my next series for TikTok, The Murder on Alibegova Street in half a day, even though I scheduled to do it in two days. So I scheduled all of Saturday and Sunday. But we actually finished at 3 p.m. on Saturday because everything worked in the first take. This this is not usually the case for filmmaking. [laughs] My first principle of filmmaking is that I always do the film whenever the very first opportunity to make it arises. So, for example, with A Date in Minsk, as soon as me and Volha and Yulia were available to do it, I did it. I didn't spend time overthinking it or developing it, so to speak. I was like, “It's the only opportunity.” And I was right.
NOTEBOOK: And that means: you all three were available, and you had the camera. That's the extent of the opportunity in that case.
LAVRETSKI: That's the extent of the opportunity. I had to take it because later Yulia emigrated to Ukraine and Volha went on several trips. I get anxious when I postpone a project because I've had it happen that the time window for the making of a film passes by. I'm trying to seize the moment, even if it sometimes means that I under develop the project. Of course, I try to do as much development and planning as possible, but the window of opportunity is more important. The second principle is that I always try to find shortcuts. Maybe it doesn't sound good, but I’m always looking to use as little effort as possible. That’s the real smart thinking. Progress in history is about finding shortcuts and not overworking yourself. In The Bear’s Lair, I found a great plug-in for Audacity, a program called PaulStretch, which creates ambient tracks by stretching a song very thinly and mashing its texture. In this case, I just took some of my favorite songs—nostalgic songs—and I made these new automated tracks. I actually do think you can still hear some distant motifs in them as they appear in the film. Thus the creation of the entire ambient soundtrack for The Bear’s Lair, which I think sounds very good, took 15 minutes because it was just a single plug-in and I just had to feed it some songs. There's just an example of an extreme shortcut to making something. I'm always thinking of such shortcuts. Seizing the opportunity. Finding shortcuts. Not overworking yourself. This is my method. I'm not saying that it's a very good method, but that's just how it is at this point in time.
NOTEBOOK: Now you’re also teaching filmmaking to Belarusian students in Vilnius.
LAVRETSKI: Yes, in our region there's not always an economic opportunity to make films in the Hollywood Way or the European Arthouse Way. My way, at the very least, has led to some sort of success. One thing I will teach the students is to keep and sustain the local context to their art. I think this is very important. Belarusian films, Belarusian underground films, made in the last ten years—a lot of them are even more obscure than my films. Still, it’s important for any young filmmaker to see how people who live in the same context or in the same locality as you do make films or make art in general. This is something you can also see with street rappers, trap artists from Atlanta, because they always hang out in the same neighborhoods and they collaborate with each other and they exchange ideas. And I think for an art scene to develop, it's very important to exchange ideas with people who are close to you. Maybe it seems like I'm such an independent, individualistic person, but actually I just took a lot of it from like world cinema—mumblecore movies have been very influential, or Lav Diaz—but also even more influential in some ways were the films in Belarus, no budget films that are part of Belarusian Hopeless Cinema—that's my definition for Belarusian underground films. The second aspect is like the producer’s approach. How does a filmmaker see the correlation between ideas and resources? How do you find the resources or know what number of resources is necessary to realize some idea or, on the other hand, what sort of ideas can you realize with the number of resources you have to hand? You don’t need a budget to make any particular genre of film. The main thing for any director, even for very high budget directors, is to creatively use resources. I'm sure James Cameron is very creative with his resources. I haven't seen a lot of behind-the-scenes footage from Titanic, but I'm sure the way they combined miniatures and real sets and soundstage and so on, was very creative. He also didn't have unlimited resources. Nobody has unlimited resources. And of course, the third thing is also look at your own stuff from an editor's point of view. Not a film editor, more like an editor of a magazine. A media editor in the broader sense.
NOTEBOOK: In what sense being a media editor?
LAVRETSKI: Simply to differentiate, broadly, between what is interesting and what is not for other people to see. And it applies to many things. Just because you created something doesn’t necessarily mean it is interesting. I don't mean to sound conservative.
NOTEBOOK: Why is that conservative? Isn't that the basis of any kind of art?
LAVRETSKI: Well, I wouldn't want people to take my style as a template. For example, I think a lot of people in film schools do that. If you look at [Aleksandr] Sokurov’s pupils, they are all to one extent or another Sokurovian. If anything, the most amazing thing would be to help someone become a bigger artist. And that’s also a Gucci Mane philosophy. Gucci Mane took under his wing rappers who since then became much bigger than Gucci Mane. And Young Thug did that too. There are people who took their whole style from Young Thug. Like Gunna or Lil’ Baby or Lil’ Keed, rest in peace. They all took their style from Young Thug. And, like, half of them are more popular than he is. But it's fine. It's cool. It’s very cool. It's very lit to help someone become a bigger artist than you are. In order to do that, of course I'm not going to restrict or impose anything from the artistic point of view. But I just want people to find the impositions they're willing to place on their own work—that's a different thing altogether.
NOTEBOOK: But how do you develop your own ideas from the outset of the filmmaking process? These precepts all come later.
LAVRETSKI: Yeah. People have told me that even though my films are low effort or low production value, that they have good ideas at their core. Which makes me wonder, where do I get these ideas from? If we take A Date in Minsk, it is very logical—there is a direct source to every aspect, every idea. But maybe you simply fall in love with another film and you try to recreate it. That's a big source of ideas, but also a lot of it comes from your personal identity. Maybe as a Belarusian, for example. Or a 21st century zoomer kid. Right? You have to see what's happening, in terms of like digital cinema, in terms of new media. That’s why one of the most important things is, if you want to be an artist, you have to kind of live an artist's life. You shouldn't overwork yourself. From a young age, I tried to work a 9 to 5 job in an office but I couldn’t, so I quit that. And then I was trying to find shortcuts. How do I work less but still support myself? So that's how I found writing about film. It's weird, but you can do it. I wrote hundreds of articles about cinema. I must have like 700 reviews on Letterboxd. And they were all originally published, believe it or not, for a fee. Sometimes a very small fee, but a fee nevertheless. I’m saying that if you want to be an artist, you have to live an artist's life. There’s a Daft Punk interview where they say you have to work 8 hours a week. That would be perfect. The rest of the days you can spend just dreaming about stuff or watching movies.
NOTEBOOK: So, 8 hours of another job and the rest making films and thinking about making films.
LAVRETSKI: Yes, 8 hours for pay, that’s the right balance. You need more time to dream and think before you can produce art. But I should say that dreaming about art is also a way of producing it.
1. Available here with English subtitles.
2. The Mistakist Declaration by Harmony Korine.