Khan's flesh (Germany) by Kristina Savutsina

Khan’s Flesh by Kristina Savutsina Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive

A rigorously composed portrait of Belarusian everyday life, where Kristina Savutsina and cinematographer Georg Kussmann turn observation into a precise visual choreography of conformity, absurdity, and quiet resistance.

The Auteur Cinema Archive proudly welcomes Khan’s Flesh (Germany) by Kristina Savutsina, a formally striking documentary whose distinctive cinematic language was developed in close visual collaboration with director of photography Georg Kussmann. Together, Savutsina and Kussmann transform the rhythms of provincial Belarus into something at once deeply political, strangely humorous, and quietly tragic.

The film observes the rituals of a small town: parishioners whispering sins into a priest’s ear, a fetus’s heartbeat monitored by machine, workers leaving factory gates. Yet Khan’s Flesh does not simply document these moments. Its carefully constructed images make everyday actions appear as parts of an elaborate social choreography—bodies moving, waiting, working and positioning themselves according to systems of convention, authority and expectation.

Central to the film is the rigorous visual language created by Savutsina and Kussmann. Their static, tableau-like compositions transform familiar environments into something resembling stages. People enter and leave the frame, assemble into groups or occupy predetermined positions within institutions. The camera rarely needs to impose an argument; the geometry of the image already suggests one. Individual bodies appear simultaneously autonomous and embedded within larger structures that dictate where they stand, how they behave and what is expected of them.

This formal precision produces one of the film's most fascinating contradictions. What we see is unmistakably everyday life, yet the longer the camera observes it, the stranger it becomes. Ordinary routines begin to resemble performances. Institutional rituals acquire an unexpected theatricality. Moments that initially seem solemn can become absurd, while apparently humorous situations reveal something considerably more troubling underneath.

Through this tension, Khan’s Flesh finds the tragicomedy inherent in systems that have become so familiar that their rules are almost invisible.

Curator Kris De Meester on the inclusion:

“Khan’s Flesh is a remarkable example of how slow cinema and minimalist filmmaking can expose the tragicomic machinery of everyday life. But what makes the film particularly powerful is the precision of its visual thinking. Kristina Savutsina and director of photography Georg Kussmann create images in which composition itself becomes a form of observation. Their frames allow us to see people not simply as individuals, but as bodies navigating an architecture of social rules, rituals and expectations.

There is great discipline in refusing to overstate any of this. The camera waits, and because it waits, ordinary behaviour gradually becomes theatrical, sometimes absurd and sometimes deeply unsettling. Savutsina's direction and Kussmann's cinematography are inseparable in this respect: together they create the visual distance that allows the tragic and the comic to exist within the same frame. It is precisely this combination of formal restraint, visual intelligence and patient observation that makes Khan’s Flesh such compelling auteur cinema.”

Premiering at Visions du Réel and later winning Best Documentary Feature Film at the Brussels Independent Film Festival, Khan’s Flesh has received international recognition for its distinctive formal approach and sociopolitical resonance. Made shortly before the nationwide protests that erupted in Belarus in 2020, the film inevitably acquired an additional historical dimension: its careful observation of institutional structures, collective behaviour and social discipline now captures a society on the verge of profound upheaval.

Yet reducing Khan’s Flesh to a political document would overlook much of what makes it exceptional. Its critique emerges not through explanation or argument but through cinema itself: duration, framing, bodies, architecture, repetition and montage. Savutsina and Kussmann allow the visible world to reveal its own contradictions.

By including Khan’s Flesh in the Auteur Cinema Archive, we celebrate Kristina Savutsina’s directorial vision alongside Georg Kussmann’s essential contribution to the film’s visual language. Their collaboration demonstrates how the seemingly uneventful can become deeply revealing when observed with sufficient patience and precision—and how, within the rigid choreography of everyday life, tragedy and comedy can occupy exactly the same frame.