Every day all those who can’t really afford it are waiting for a warm meal in Liepkalnis Street in Vilnius. While the women are preparing the food in the plain bungalow, laying the tables and pouring the compote, their hungry customers are already outside, waiting for the doors to open. Until then time stands still. Some of them like to use this time for exchanges, others interact rather unwillingly.
People marked by life tell each other about blows of fate, experiences, and insights – or simply misunderstand each other. “Are you talking about Lithuania?” – “No, we’re talking about death.” And yet there seems to be a general wordless communication going on here – at least that’s what the gestures and looks seem to indicate. Tomorrow is a new day and they will be waiting for their lunch again. An unadorned portrait from the margins of society.

Lars Meyer

Vitas who? Vitas Luckus, master of photography, perhaps the greatest in the whole wide former Soviet Union – though very few people knew this because he was never exhibited. His lifestyle was too non-conformist (his pet: a lion), his works too radical (proletarian social realism, naked women’s bodies, the ganglands of Odessa), he himself was too restless (partying non-stop). In short: too uncompromising to the last, when he jumped out of a window three years before Lithuania’s independence.

This film demonstrates how to reconstruct the genius of an artist and the atmosphere of a lifelong amour fou without getting sentimental or bogged down in myth. And more: Vitas Luckus’s unique photos, which today, after his “outing”, as it were, provide, among other things, the context for his friend Boris Mikhailov’s globally renowned oeuvre, open a view on a very special world shimmering in every facet, from the playful tenderness of lovers to the everyday routines between KGB interrogations and Union bohème. And what rare bliss, too: black and white photos, analogue, albums on paper. Their technical simplicity hides a life full of complexities.

Barbara Wurm

Lithuania is proud of its great variety of butterflies. Around 100 species explore the country every year. Marija Stonytė has produced a documentary declaration of love to these magnificent summer birds. Tenderly, a woman breeds butterflies in her flat, observes them pupate, hatch, beat their wings for the first time. Humans keep trying again and again to stage nature for their own purposes. They may ultimately be no more than spectators on cheap seats who witness magic.

Julia Weigl

The balancing act that filmmakers meeting their protagonists have to perform is well-known as a path strewn with snares, frustration and surprises. Patience is the prime virtue and a certain degree of empathy also helps. Marta Dauliūté and Elisabeth Marjanović Cronvall meet a group of young Lithuanian men aboard a “Swede ferry” and decide to make a film about these migrant workers. The men refuse, mostly because they do not understand what’s interesting enough about them for two women to fill a whole film with. They don’t want to confirm the stereotype of the migrant worker and feel no inclination to feed the media-induced sympathy machine. A documentary about earthquakes, that’s something they could understand. But about them?
Marta and Elisabeth are not deterred; they drink and dance with the men – and despite their initial resistance, their “subjects of study” gradually begin to acquiesce. Despite their aggressive refusal and stereotypical macho behaviour, the women with the camera manage to scratch their facades after a while and expose – disguised as flirty posing – their innermost thoughts. The result is an attentive study that lays bare a whole series of current social injustices while also providing a clever commentary on the specifically female look at a male object.

Lina Dinkla