Belarus is a country from the past, nostalgic and peculiar past. The landscapes are picturesque and idyllic, even omnipresent Lenin’s monuments do not interfere with the harmony. Rural inhabitants there live as their ancestors used to live centuries ago, they work hard, milk their cows and talk how imperfect the word has become. The dialogues sound not old-fashioned but eternal. These old people are quite content with their life and wait submissively for death to come but still appreciate very much the fact they get their pension regularly. And they are also sure it happens only thanks to the President Lukashenko. Fifteen years ago this former leader of the Soviet agricultural farm was elected at the open and fair elections by the majority of Belarusians who felt he was just like them. Since then, Lukashenko has become a real Belarusian destiny: no democratic elections have taken place any more and Belarus has started its existence in the heads of Europeans as the ‘last dictatorship in Europe’. However, Lukashenko is much loved by his old voters. One of them lives in a deserted village where he is the last inhabitant. It is so painful for him that his whole world fades away so he tries to recreate it somehow having built a little wooden village populated by wooden peasants who are involved in everyday business of marriages and funerals, agricultural work and church holidays. It is just a miniature copy of Belarusian disappearing reality. His phantom villagers are not less alive for the master than his own being. He sees himself as their President and rules over them ‘like Lukashenko over living people’. Yet, he feels sorry for Lukashenko as, unlike his wooden figures, ‘living people do not obey Lukashenko completely’. It comes true in the footage of street protest marches on the very same central square in Minsk where seasons and faces change but the place and actions stay the same. People, mostly young, protest against the regime, as a result they are severely beaten by the militia riot squad. These are specific events with concrete people suffered, but at the same time, the beatings look more like ritual and tradition rather than a piece of current affairs. In some paradoxical way it is similar to archive footage of an ancient life in a Belarusian village ninety years ago with its archetypal occupations and faces. And just the same timeless appears to be one more important component of modern Belarusian existence – the chronicle of total demolition of rural houses in Chernobyl zone.Despite this painful but inevitable disappearance of an old epoch, in reality many years might pass until something in Belarus changes radically. And, like the shadowy wooden village of the old master, this film is also a kind of emotional preservation, just a moment between Belarusian past and future.