The film is a day in the life that passes by, even if it seems neverending. In the morning the streets are alive with people, pedestrians and cars, with loud and exultant noise. Such sounds accompany the restless walk of a woman and her child across a dusty street, while Bartas’ gaze wanders through many different perspectives.Read More »
In an intriguing long take static shot of the oppressively barren Siberian frontier, a converted tank (turned off-road passenger utility vehicle) traverses a rugged terrain that seemingly bisects a rural, indigenous village, disappears in a spray of displaced mud as it sinks partially out of frame into a trench, then momentarily re-emerges to continue on its plodding journey, only to become imperceptible from the horizon once again as it descends into a series of depressions on the gravel road. Watching this sequence (and film) again within the added context of having also seen Twentynine Palms, I couldn’t help but think that Bruno Dumont must somehow have been influenced by this unstructured and glacially paced, yet lucidly pure, challenging, and entrancingly reductive film by Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, a feature that he developed from his earlier diploma film, Tolofaria on the nomadic, indigenous tribe.Read More »
A northern story of silent hate between two brothers based on the award wining Torgny Lindgren’s novel.Read More »
One of the greatest and best known Nekrosius productions.
Hamletas marked the beginning of Nekrosius’s studio, Meno Fortas, which is dedicated to performance and actor training and earned Nekrosius the 1998 St. Kristoforas for highest theatrical achievement in Europe.Read More »
A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years.Read More »
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“Eternal Light” (“Amžinoji šviesa”) (1988) – Lithuanian feature film, one of the most remarkable cinema works of the country during the last decade. In the story of Rimantas Šavelis the film director Puipa returns to the village, roots, to the end of fifties – the period, traditional in the Lithuanian cinema. Here, contrary to the films of such type, Puipa shows the post-war period not in a publicistic, but a lyrical and subtle way. Though weapons can be seen in the hands of the characters, shots are not resounding here, and the general plot is limited to the emotional relationship among four main characters. A land-surveyor Anicetas (actor Vidas Petkevičius) has an aversion to his persecutor Pranė (actress Daiva Stubraitė) and marries the loved Amilė (actress Virginija Kelmelytė) from the other village.Read More »
Andrius and Liuka, offsprings of Šatai and Kaminskai families living in a countryside, falls in love with each other, however their love is disrupted by… a cow.
This is a lyrical tragicomedy about memories of childhood, adolescence, and first love in a small provincial town, shown through complexity of human relations at this periodical film.Read More »
La Cinémathèque française wrote:
In 1977, accompanied by his wife and daughter, Jonas Mekas returned to Lithuania for the second time since he went into exile in 1944. Documentary filmmaker Robertas Verba records the images of the return to the homeland, the memory of which permeates Mekas’ cinema.
Film digitised from a 35mm print by the Lithuanian Central State Archives in 2022 for the Lithuanian Film Centre.Read More »
This philosophical drama offers a psychological reflection of the post-war period. Caesar, a former Nazi concentration camp prisoner, sifts through his traumatic experiences. His memories materialize against the background of the new modern buildings of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and become even stronger when Caesar learns of the death of a friend and fellow traveler. Caesar’s daughter Veronica is a fervent young playwright seeking to immortalize her father’s experience on film. However, her attitude towards her father’s past is quite different from his own. Adopting a boldly non-linear narrative, AVE, VITA! takes the audience on a hallucinatory journey from the war years to the then-contemporary realities of the Soviet era.Read More »