Filmmaker Victor Dashuk sends out a bitter distress call from the former Soviet republic of Belarus with two short documentary exposes that are at Two Boots Pioneer this week. Wedged between Poland and Russia, “Europe’s last dictatorship” is one of many where communist-era tyranny now simply has a new face, and Mr. Dashuk pulls no punches against his homeland’s thug in chief, Alexander Lukashenko.

In the thoughtful “Long Knives Night,” Mr. Dashuk laments a national weakness for leader worship and the accompanying sin of passivity. Originally made in 1997, the film is still a fresh record of Mr. Lukashenko’s ascent to power, involving the dissolution of parliament and quashed riots. Mr. Dashuk makes something of a litany of the leaders (since Stalin) whom he has lived under, striking a devastatingly present-tense elegiac note.

By 2001, Mr. Lukashenko was routinely imprisoning or disappearing political opponents, and “Reporting From the Rabbit Hole,” from that year, plays as if shot on the run. The operative image and metaphor here is the kidnapping: Several terrifying instances are shown in which masked or helmeted men simply hustle someone off the street, never to be seen again. A playwright and another filmmaker testify, bruised, to their own night-time beatings.

Throughout both films, the tenacity of the press and resistant citizens (like Mr. Dashuk) inspire. Whether a reporter denouncing a blockaded electoral office or a mother bleeding after a protest she says she joined for the sake of her children’s future, democratic ideals do not go quietly into the night. Mr. Lukashenko, meanwhile, looks like a frustrated middle manager, but more terrifying than funny.

Mr. Dashuk’s courageous (and dramatic) effort will, one hopes, draw Western attention to other beleaguered ex-Soviet republics. Some of them have plenty of warning signs: leaders winning an election with 91% of the vote (Kazakhstan), massacring protesters and then jailing the survivors (Uzbekistan), or leaders who spend billions on statues of themselves and fill bookstores with only their books (Turkmenistan).