Opinions & Interviews

“At the current stage of cooperation in the field of culture, the main task of the Ministries of Culture of Belarus and Russia is to support any initiative of the other side. We must coordinate the proposals on a variety of levels, from the highest to the lowest, in order to ensure that they should develop independently in the future,” Boris Svetlov noted.

According to him, Belarus and Russia have recently hosted a lot of events as part of cultural exchange. The cooperation relies on the good regulatory basis. The Ministries of Culture of Belarus and Russia signed a program of cooperation for 2015-2017. “But this agreement is rather a statement of fact. It has formalized what we have achieved already. Now, in our view, we should develop more actively horizontal links between regions and between cultural institutions,” Boris Svetlov said.

Belarus hosts many remarkable joint projects: Slavonic Bazaar in Vitebsk, Listapad film festival, the festival Vladimir Spivakov Invites. The days of culture of Belarus and Russia have become traditional. So have many other events. “We maintain close ties in filmmaking. In the past five years alone about 20 joint Belarusian-Russian film projects have been carried out at the Belarusfilm film studio. The most important was the movie Brest Fortress. Now we are discussing the project to make a movie about our famous countryman Andrei Gromyko, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union. He was an iconic figure who should be celebrated in cinema. We are now working on this,” the Belarusian Culture Minister said.