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18-yr-old Kostia takes us around his sleepy village in Belarus meeting his family and friends, in this atmospheric observation of small-town life in a country stifled by an autocratic president.
Belarus has been called ‘Europe’s last Dictatorship’, ruled by President Lukashenko since the collapse of the USSR. Young Kostia – 18 and about to vote for the first time – muses on the future for his country with his family and friends in his small village. ‘Mayskaya Street‘ becomes, thanks to the people who live on it, an open window onto Belarus.
As people scrape together enough work to get by with good humour, the local painter describes what a century of Stalinism, Chernobyl, the KGB and an autocratic president has done to the spine and identity of the Belarussian people. Through intimate, often amusing, observations from small town life, the film addresses a larger issue of a disenchanted and paralysed country, caught between external pressures from the east and west.