Lithuania

After her boyfriend has a psychotic episode and disappears, Maria is decided to let nothing stop her from helping him. Grabbing at every clue about his whereabouts she embarks on a fast-paced odyssey through the city.Read More »

Lithuanian provincial town is facing the economic crisis in 2008. Vytas gets fired from the factory. Pushed by his wife, he immediately starts looking for a new job, but not really successfully. After having his haircut done, Vytas starts looking for a new love affair with a hairdresser Marija, but not really successfully, either. Finally, Vytas gets involved into a third search – he starts looking for a guy who posted video on youtube, claiming he saw Jesus Christ in their town. This is the only time he succeeds.Read More »

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Documentary about Lithuania in the years 1989 to 1991, when the Baltic country broke away from the Soviet Union. Because of the peaceful protests with much singing, this period was later also called the ‘singing revolution’. As one of the founders of the independence movement, Vytautas Landsbergis was at the heart of the historical upheaval. His incisive reflections are complemented by extensive archive footage of demonstrations, party congresses and the Soviet military intervention.Read More »

It follows Rimants who is more interested in playing rugby, listening to music and dealing on the black market than studying for school, but when he falls in love with Monika, his faith in love and the future is tested.Read More »

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Dreaming of escape from the bleakness of their industrial Lithuanian hometown, two thirteen-year-olds, Marija and Kristina, form a unique bond at a local modeling school. But the promise of a better life pushes girls to violate their bodies in increasingly extreme ways.Read More »

From imdb
Gaile is a speech therapist who realises that, after a traumatising event in her life, she has lost the ability to have emotions. While she is preparing a video presentation, she notices that her emotions are indirectly starting to come back via the filmed picture ? especially aggressions. She decides to take on a daring experiment. She provokes extreme situations and hires a cameraman to film her. Through these shots, she is able to start a quest for her lost emotions: happiness, empathy, and hate. Her test arrangements get more dangerous, and the relationship to her cameraman, who has to implement her fantasies, begins to charge more and more sexually. A world of voyeurism, obsessions and perversion is revealed, and Gaile starts to ask herself how far she could go. A film about self-discovery and about the role of audiovisual media in our life. Don’t we do something similar as the emotional ‘collectress’ with our cellphone videos?Read More »

THE DEVIL’S BRIDE (VELNIO NUOTAKA) – 1974, Lithuanian Film Centre, 78 min. Imagine a wildly surreal early 1970s Lithuanian rock opera directed by Ken Russell circa TOMMY that is equal parts JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (wailing guitar-heavy ballads, religious theme), FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (rural village setting) and THE WICKER MAN / BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (folklore / folk magic), and you have some idea of the elemental strangeness and beauty of director Arūnas Žebriūnas’ THE DEVIL’S BRIDE. The film opens with one of our favorite musical sequences ever: a long-haired flower child God sits on his throne in the heavenly mountains, adored by angelic hosts in white robes and wings. Read More »

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 »