Khan’s Flesh by Kristina Savutsina Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive: A rigorously composed portrait of Belarusian everyday life, oscillating between tragedy and absurdity.

The Auteur Cinema Archive proudly welcomes Khan’s Flesh (Germany) by Kristina Savutsina, a formally striking documentary that transforms the rhythms of provincial Belarus into something at once deeply political, strangely humorous, and achingly tragic.

Structured through meticulously staged tableau-like compositions, Khan’s Flesh observes the rituals of a small town: parishioners whispering sins into a priest’s ear, a fetus’s heartbeat recorded by machine, workers leaving the factory gates. In Savutsina’s framing, these moments lose their casual banality and instead appear as choreographed gestures within an invisible theater—movements dictated by norms, rules, and hierarchies. What emerges is a social architecture where discipline and conformity intertwine with fleeting absurdity.

This duality—the tragic weight of systemic control and the comic estrangement of seeing the ordinary reframed—anchors the film’s power. Through montage and rhythm, Khan’s Flesh breaks down these institutionalized structures, refracting them into a kaleidoscope of the tragicomical everyday.

Curator Kris De Meester on the inclusion:

“Kristina Savutsina’s Khan’s Flesh is a brilliant example of how slow cinema and minimalist form can illuminate the tragicomic mechanics of everyday life. Her rigorously composed frames reveal how individuals move within—and against—the invisible systems that shape them. What could appear mundane becomes at once absurd, theatrical, and unsettlingly human.”

Premiering at Visions du Réel and later winning Best Documentary Feature Film at the Brussels Independent Film Festival, Khan’s Flesh has been recognized internationally for its innovative formalism and sharp sociopolitical resonance. Completed just a year before the mass protests in Belarus, the film now reads as an eerie prelude to national unrest, capturing a society caught between quiet submission and the inevitability of rupture.

By situating Khan’s Flesh in the Auteur Cinema Archive, we honor Savutsina’s ability to turn everyday gestures into a mirror of political life and human endurance—cinema that is at once critical, poetic, and disarmingly funny.

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