The film revolves around the lives of teenagers in Soviet Lithuania. The protagonists of the film are fans of rock’n’roll music which is banned in the USSR and are interested in the hippie movement, secretly listening to the Luxembourg radio. They all live in a house which was formerly a hotel, called “America”. Events of Kaunas’ spring affect them as they are involved. After their attempt to send a letter to the Luxembourg radio, teenagers would become suspects to the KGB. Read More »
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Unusual both because, as Näripea states, it “lacks the ideological markers of Soviet life” and because it features an unmarried mother as one of its main characters, Arūnas Žebriūnas’s Lithuanian The Beauty (Gražuolé) focuses on free-spirited nine-year-old Inga (Inga Mickyte), whose self-confidence is shattered when a new neighbour declares her ugly, opening up her early rite of passage into the adult world of disillusionment that her single mother (Lilija Zadeikyte) already fully occupies. Read More »
A group of protesters, from all around Lithuania, gather at the Television Tower to protect it from approaching Soviet tanks and paratroopers. Read More »
About the movie
Film is about immeasurable loneliness of child, only loneliness and nothing more. Story was shoot without any manipulation means. Trip to prison, meeting, way home. That’s all. Movie leading to ethical problem, how deep into person’s pain we can interfere, documentary can interfere. Read More »
According to the recorded narrations, 300 years ago, during the Lithuanian-Swedish war, the bell of Plateliai church belfry was taken down and was being carried over the ice of the frozen lake when the ice broke near the Castle island and the bell sank. Read More »
Gena is under no illusions about his situation. In the prologue of the film, he briefly sketches out his life in a monotone voiceover: growing up without parents, receiving an “education” from his criminal uncle, initial protection money rackets in the wake of privatizations in the crumbling Soviet Union, later international drug dealing. His enemies are numerous but not easy to recognize; “life is short, the greater part of it already over”. Although there is only a small chance that Gena will be able to trade in his nomadic existence between Asia and Europe for a “normal life”, he takes the plunge anyway. A frantic chase across Europe thus ensues. Heading west, presumably towards the sun. Read More »
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While shooting “Tree days” (director Sarunas Bartas) I met Georgian Alexander Oboladze. We lived in the same hotel room. From restaurants and parties tycoon he became completely single. For me strange is the situation then man is stranded away from homeland but haven’t lost his mentality, language; just like exotic tree grown up in Lithuania. He was wandering around Vilnius old town, knew every corner and basement of it like no one else. He was looking and finding lost time, things left by other men and creating from it his own unique world. Read More »