The Baltic Film Festival CinéBaltique will be held in Paris for the second time

Following a successful debut last year, the second Baltic film festival CinéBaltique will bring audiences together in Paris from 5 to 8 February, presenting more than twenty films from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

This year, the festival once again will take place at the historic L’Arlequin cinema in central Paris, where several films will be screened in France for the first time. The festival program, which consists of 6 feature films and 16 short films, has been curated by French film curator Thibaut Bracq, who has extensive experience at international film festivals. Each screening will be accompanied by discussions with members of the film’s creative teams.

The festival will open on Thursday evening with the film Renovation, directed by Gabrielė Urbonaitė. The opening screening will be attended by one of the film’s lead actors, Šarūnas Zenkevičius, as well as cinematographer Vytautas Katkus. During the festival, Katkus will also present his own directed film, The Visitor, with the screening attended by the film’s producer Marija Razgutė (M-Films).

Both films had their world premieres at one of Europe’s most important film festivals in Karlovy Vary, where Katkus received the award for Best Director, and have since successfully toured film events across Europe and worldwide.

In total, three short film programs from the Baltic states have been prepared for the festival. Director Gintarė Parulytė will present her short film Sujip in Paris, and actor Šarūnas Zenkevičius will introduce Klaudija Matvejevaitė’s film All In. The program also includes Arnas Balčiūnas’s film Past the Hill of Napoleon’s Hat, Adas Burkšaitis’s Left-Handed Pen, and Glimpses Among Parallels by Olga Abramova.

Now in its second year, the festival is becoming an important platform for Baltic region’s audiovisual culture within Paris’s events calendar. It offers audiences an opportunity to become acquainted with the diversity of Baltic cinema, its prevailing trends and artistic directions, while also increasing the international visibility of creators from the region.

Alongside the festival, a Baltic-French co-production workshop is being held for the first time. Organised in collaboration with the French National Centre of Cinema (CNC), it aims to foster connections with French producers, explore co-production opportunities, and present Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian projects currently in development.

The workshop will feature the film project Breadcrumbs in the Snow, with director Skirmanta Jakaitė and producer Agnė Adomėnė (Art Shot); the project Call Me Salvador, with director Titas Laucius and producer Klementina Remeikaitė (Afterschool); and the project Beginners, with director Birutė Kapustinskaitė and producer Justinas Pocius (Smart Casual).

This year, the festival is also collaborating with the Public Information Library in the Centre Pompidou and the Cinémathèque du documentaire par la Bpi, which are hosting a retrospective of Baltic documentary cinema titled Poétiques baltes. The event, running until March 15, will screen more than 50 documentaries created between 1960 and 2000.

The Baltic film festival CinéBaltique is organized by the Lithuanian Film Centre, the National Film Centre of Latvia and the Estonian Film Institute, in cooperation with the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian embassies in France.

On the cover – a still from The Visitor.