Having watched The Lives of Others – the winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, “a grim portrayal of life in East Germany before reunification and the twisted relationship between cultural elites and the Stasi secret police” – TOL's Belarus Blog observes: “But as I spoke to my friends in Minsk, read the websites with news from Belarus, and recalled travels to that country, I realized that in some parts of Eastern Europe, the film was more about current events than the past.”