The priest's ear recognises the sins of the parishioners. The heartbeat of the foetus is monitored. Workers leaving factory. Khan’s Flesh shows the everyday life of a small town in Belarus as choreographies within stage-like images. The inhabitants move and position their bodies depending on the situation and according to their social and professional status. A skeleton of norms, rules and role models, completed with the bodies of active citizens, becomes a vital structure whose components alternatingly discipline themselves through mutual control, praise and punishment. The interwoven social structures are getting traced, broken up and re-contextualized by a dance-like montage. The images strict tableau-style reveals a surreal theatricality of the institutionally shaped everyday life. At the same time Telo Khana (Khan’s Flesh) is a contemporary document of life in the Belarusian province.

Dir. Kristina Savutsina, Cinematographer: Georg Kussmann - 57min - 2021 - Belarus, Germany

"The place that used to be home has become the object of an investigation. I left the country because there were too many restrictions. But my film Khan‘s Flesh is not a didactic piece about the horrors of dictatorship. I am interested in something more fundamental: the structure of power in everyday life." Kristina Savutsina, read her director's statement at www.truestoryfilm.blog

"Cast in a subdued, beige-toned palette, the tableau-like compositions in Kristina Savutsina’s documentary portrait of a small Belarusian village echo the wry sensibility found in the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson...Considering the complex sociopolitics of the region, this representation of community and geographical identity is much more fragile than it seems, and should not be taken for granted." - Guardian

"Like a Dziga Vertov under lexomil, Krystsina Savutsina's camera captures a series of gestures, micro non-events and concomitant rituals, like so many daily choreographies to which one indulges or submits the inhabitants, all generations combined, of this town in Belarus. Khan's Flesh reveals existences that seem becalmed in an interminable present and takes a distanced look, tinged with irony, on a society corseted by intangible power relations." - Visions du Reel