Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya stressed the importance of culture during the 2020 Belarus protests and in restoring Belarus' image in the West, in Berlin, on Friday.

Tikhanovskaya joined a panel discussion on the documentary film 'Courage' featured at this years Berlinale alongside the director Aliaksei Paluyan and Nobel Prize for Literature Svetlana Alexievich.

Tikhanovskaya stated, "You know in the west it is necessary to radically change the representation of Belarus, because for 26 years, Belarus for some reason is perceived as an addition to Russia, completely forgetting that we are totally different people, with our own identities, our own culture, our own history language, which is surprisingly not similar to Russian."

The film follows the lives of three actors before and during the protests on the streets of Minsk in 2020.

Paluyan stated, "I asked myself, are you an activist, or do you want to make films? I asked this question in the morning before filming and that meant that I was not arrested and that this film was made."

"I think that I can only do only one thing, I can make films, I can try to sensitise people to this topic, especially in Western Europe, so that they talk to each other and that they read with each other about us, that this voice is simply as loud as possible, " he added.