Latest Projects at Baltic Sea Docs

The six Lithuanian film projects presented at this year’s Baltic Sea Docs explore a wide range of themes, from sensitive reflections on personal and family histories to stories of identity, relationships and the challenges of everyday life.

Held annually in Riga since 2005, Baltic Sea Docs is the only event of its kind in the Baltic region. Each year, it brings together more than 150 film industry professionals from the Baltic states and Central and Eastern Europe.

The forum gives filmmakers an opportunity to present their projects to potential funders and partners and to help their films reach wider audiences across Europe. The industry events are accompanied by a documentary film programme screened in Riga and other major Latvian cities.

As last year, the forum’s 30th edition will feature six documentary projects involving Lithuanian filmmaking teams.

Among them is director Vita Maria Drygas’s documentary essay Encounters/Departures (prod. Teresa Rožanovska, Ketvirta Versija; co-prod. Vita Želakevičiūtė, Drygas Film Production, Poland). The filmmaker turns to the legacy of her grandfather, Vytautas Žalakevičius, one of Lithuania’s most renowned film directors. Following his traces through archives, films and people’s memories, she discovers not only his story but also a universal human journey. She is not interested in building a monument to a great director. Instead, she searches for the person hidden behind the official biography.

Director Jūratė Samulionytė and screenwriter Rūta Dambravaitė will present their project Two of Us (prod. Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė and Danielė Kunčinaitė, Just a Moment) in Riga. To the outside world, Vitalius and Albinas present themselves as father and son, though they are, in fact, partners. They met in Soviet Lithuania, when same-sex relationships were condemned and criminalised. Despite rejection from their families and society, they have spent more than half a century together. At the age of 70, Vitalius decides to come out publicly and begins fighting for legal recognition of their relationship. Yet he is also racing against time as the health of his partner, Albinas, gradually deteriorates.

My Shadows Grow Faster Than Me (dirs. Roman Bondarchuk and Darya Averchenko; prod. Jurga Gluskinienė, Monoklis; co-prods. Darya Averchenko, SOUTH FILMS, Ukraine, and Uldis Cekulis, VFS Films, Latvia) turns to the theme of identity. When Russia’s invasion forces a Ukrainian documentary filmmaking family to flee to Britain, their children grow up surrounded by a new language and culture. The parents film what is gradually being lost as they seek to understand what it means to return home when home itself is changing.

See What I Say (dir. Arturas Jevdokimovas; prod. Ringailė Leščinskienė, Zero Copy Reel; co-prods. Giusi Santoro, POPCULT, Italy, and Ivanna Khitsinska, WAYA Production, Ukraine) is an observational documentary about what happens when familiar ways of communicating no longer work. Deaf and hearing people who speak different languages try to find new ways of reaching one another. Their encounters reveal that communication begins not with a shared language, but with a desire to understand another person.

The Czech–Lithuanian–Slovak co-production My Other, Perfect Me (dir. Veronika Lišková; prods. Martina Netíková and Kristýna Michálek Květová, Cinémotif Films; co-prod. Giedrė Žickytė, Moonmakers) centres on Tereza, a successful actress and musician, who struggles with bulimia hidden behind her public life. As her condition begins to threaten her voice and career, she embarks on a cinematic journey confronting her desire for perfection and searching for a path toward recovery.

Another project is the Ukrainian–Lithuanian co-production Ravine and Tower (dir. Oleksiy Radynski; prod. Lyuba Knorozok, Kinotron Group; co-prod. Studija Kinema). Babyn Yar in Kyiv – the area of one of the worst Nazi massacres of the Shoah – was subject to Soviet state-sanctioned oblivion for decades. Now, it is under Russian attack. The films traces the troubled history and uncertain future of Babyn Yar to reveal how the troubled past still defines the present.

The documentary film programme will also feature Under the Red Light (dir. Joris Skudra; prod. Justė Michailinaitė, Broom Films), which explores the life and work of photographer Romualdas Požerskis. The film was presented as a project in the forum’s industry programme last year.

On the cover – a still from See What I Say.

+3