Tag: Lithuania

Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania (Penkios su Puse Meilės Istorijos, Nutikusios Viename Vilniaus Bute

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Director, Tomas Vengris and his co-writer, Tatia Rosenthal’s, Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania (Penkios su puse meilės istorijos, nutikusios viename Vilniaus bute, 2023), opens on an empty apartment whose walls shake, as plaster and dust fall from the ceiling. This image repeats itself between each of the five stories, which are named after William Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Set in an Airbnb apartment, guests come and go, but it’s not only the theme of love, as the title suggests, that connects this disparate group of people. In some cases, it’s sex, conversation and disagreement. In between each story, host Jolanta (Velta Žygure) prepares the apartment for the new arrivals. The building’s maintenance person, Jokūbas (Vidas Petkevičius), becomes like her shadow, and Jolanta experiences her own touching romance.

The film is a memory of the apartment’s story, a stage upon which episodes of human drama have played out. The vibrating walls and falling plaster suggest the apartment’s life is flashing before its eyes. This is nonsensical, of course. The apartment, made of brick and mortar, has no consciousness, and yet Vengris and Rosenthal create an impression of a life lived by their apartment.

The appeal of stories set in a restricted space taps into the concept of world-building. There’s something in the film’s aura created by collapsing this group of stories into one space or turning this apartment into a dramatic stage for people to share personal moments, even to air their dirty laundry. Perhaps it’s less world building and more to do with peeking into chapters of their lives, where what happens next is unknown. The allure of short stories is the fleetingness of time we spend with characters. In the case of Five and a Half Love Stories…, we’re interested enough to wonder what becomes of the characters once they leave and return home.

The first story, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day, Sonnet 18 centres around an Irish hen party, where Meghan (Valene Kane), sister of the bride to be, who married her first love, injures the stripper and struggles when the bridesmaids invite a group of men to the apartment to party. The second story, Love Alters Not, Sonnet 116, features an Israeli couple, Issa (Yiftach Klein) and Galia (Hadar Ratzon Rotem) who are trying for a child. She wants to find out who their family is before they start their own, specifically if a relative was appointed as a Kapo by the Nazis, or saved kids and fought in the uprising. While she’s out, Issa stays to work, but is distracted by the loud upstairs neighbour, whose rampant lovemaking and domestic dispute puts him in a compromising position.

Unlike the succinctness of the first story about the choice Meghan makes that will change her life, or how people see her, it takes longer for the second story to come together. Love Alters Not is the most humorous entry. Its burst of humour comes through Issa’s choice of provocative instead of calming words. At one moment, he says, “I can’t do Holocaust, and IPO, and fertility and the nymphomaniac upstairs, all at once. Enough, I’m at my limit.” The comedy also comes out of the naturally funny scenario with the neighbour, that turns him into what his wife calls a fifteen-year-old when she returns and catches him masturbating.

Arguably the fourth story, Full Many a Glorious Morning Have I Seen, Sonnet 33, about a young man who rents an apartment to impress his boyfriend, should have built on the earlier humour, but fails to. Instead, it exercises too much restraint, and feels like a lethargic story about two young men playing house. It’s left to bridge the third story, So True a Fool Is Love, Sonnet 57, about Philip (Gèza Röhrig), a musician, whose attempts to win back Simona (Adelè Šuminskaitè) goes awry, and even a lustful rendezvous with a young musician doesn’t go his way, and the fifth story, To Me, Fair Friend, You Never Can Be Old, Sonnet 104, about Jolanta’s own intimate connection.

Vengris and Rosenthal’s anthology is, for the most part, consistently solid. Maybe, the fourth story is about insecurity, but it’s passivity and lack of playfulness casts it as the weak link. The first and second entries are different approaches to the short form, but each is effective, as is the final story that brings everything to a fitting conclusion. There’s a certain kinship between the first and third segments with two characters who come to realise how lost they are. Issa and Galia might be the two outliers that symbolise the permanence of love, whereas for all the other characters, love, lust, or human connection is as fleeting as the fate of the building.

While each story is titled after a Shakespearean sonnet, the film doesn’t rely on the audience being familiar with them, nor should it. What’s necessary is that Five and a Half Love Stories… is two films in one. It appears Meghan’s momentary insecurity, comparing herself to others, in which her regret leads to an impulsive and life-changing decision, is inspired by the sonnet. The same seems true of Love Alters Not, but others may be more loose adaptations. Perhaps the point of the film is that the human experience is timeless, even as lives and buildings are dismantled and replaced.

Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania just premiered in the Rebels With a Cause Competition of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Call Of God (Kõne Taevast)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The following quote from the late director Kim Ki-duk comes right at the start of this film, the last one he shot prior to his death from complications arising from COVID-19.

“The closer they are to death, the more humans miss and reminisce about their youth. I miss my twenties, although I made many mistakes in my youth. So, if I go back to that time, I really want to do good. But life never comes back.”

Kim wasn’t alive to complete it, so what we have here is the film put together from colleagues who worked with him. We’ll never know exactly how close the film is to what he intended, but it will have to do.

It was shot outside his native Korea – not the first time director Kim has done this: his second movie Wild Animals (1997) was shot in France, Amen (2011) in various parts of Europe and Stop (2015) in Japan. In recent years, various #metoo allegations against him by actresses have turned him into something of a persona non grata at home, and he’s been forced to work elsewhere. This final film was made in two Baltic States – Estonia and Lithuania – as well as Kyrgyzstan, with dialogue in Russian and Kyrgyz. The two lead actors could pass for Korean.

It takes place in the dreams of its young woman protagonist (Zhanel Sergazina), an idealistic romantic in search of / waiting for love to strike, when one day, a smart young man (Abylai Maratov) asks her the way to the Dream Café. It’s a sunny day and they walk in the park. Suddenly a thief snatches her purse, and the man sets off in pursuit, getting punched in the face but getting her bag back. After this, they start seeing one another. He turns out to be an author, so she buys his book. The next time they meet, it turns out he was going to give her a copy.

She initially resists his physical advances, but that doesn’t last long, and images soon get pretty racy. She starts talking about trust and accesses his mobile phone, whereupon she discovers that he’s still communicating with an old girlfriend and makes him swear he will speak to no other women from now on.

The black and white photography (i.e. most of the film) ostensibly represents a dream state, but that’s somewhat complicated by a parallel framing narrative in which, also in black and white, the woman periodically wakes from her dream and gets messages on her mobile phone (presumably the eponymous call of God) informing her that what occurred in her dream will soon recur in her waking life and advising that if she wants to see what happens next, she needs to go back to sleep. While you’re pondering what it all means, at the end of the film, it starts all over again, but this time in colour as what happened in her dream recurs in her waking life.

It’s bizarre that the film should play like a dream state when Kim himself would shortly pass into the next life – while you’re watching it there’s a definite sense of the hallucinatory, walking through parks, or later walking through nature, and the naive. In other parts, it throws the extraordinary at you, such as the scene where the couple feed each other tidbits on the end of sharp, pointed kitchen knife blades. And as elsewhere in the director’s films, there are characters who from time to time step outside the realm of the politically correct.

There’s something compelling about all this, to do with the very nature of cinema: sitting with a bunch of strangers in a darkened space for a group act of collective dreaming. For a while, Kim was the bad boy of Korean cinema, if not world cinema, going beyond the pale and doing things considered unacceptable. This film represents an intriguing coda to a fascinating if uneven career which refused to play by the rules.

Call Of God shows in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, as part of the Critics’ Picks strand.

Feature Film About Life (Ilgo metro filmas apie gyvenimą)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

When Dovilė (Agnė Misiūnaitė) finds out her father has died, she heads onto the rooftop of her workspace. The camera slowly zooms out like in a paranoid 70s thriller, until her tiny form is finally contrasted against a huge apartment block, each open window containing its own microcosmic world. Where many directors may have chosen a teary close-up, Lithuanian director Dovilė Šarutytė opts for alienation, expanding the auto-fictional form in fascinating ways.

A camera move repeated throughout Feature Film About Life, it’s an illustrative way of the angular approach this director takes to grief, growing-up and the relationship between daughters and fathers. While the metafictional title might suggest a whimsical exploration of life and death, and one woman’s witty way of navigating it, the actual form of the film is a far more nuanced and smart take on Dovilė’s sudden thrust into adulthood.

In a bittersweet prelude, Dovilė starts the film in Paris. One of her first trips as an adult, she reflects with her friends on the irony of spending the day sightseeing. Beloved by her parents, this was the type of activity she assumed she would never do when travelling by herself. It’s a neat reflection of the ways one can grow into adulthood without even knowing it.

An even bigger challenge awaits: organising her father’s funeral. They seem to have been invented not just to process grief, but to defer it. When caught up in the bureaucracy of organising parlours and flowers, receptions and priests, cremation or burial, it’s impossible to take a step back and remember your loved one for who they truly are. A Feature Film About Life takes us on a journey through shabby restaurants, grim offices and bleak graveyards, showing how the business of navigating death can be its own coming-of-age story.

Šarutytė intersperses the matter-of-fact story with home-footage taken by her own father in the 90s. Not only do they show that the era was a seemingly universal mood — big glasses, bad hair, multi-colour puffer jackets — but create an intimate conversation between past and present. The director finds associative ways to bring boxy home video and full-screen digital together — like match cutting between symbols or allowing one scene to comment on the other — showing us in real time Dovilė reflecting on the past. It always makes me wonder how these types of films will look twenty years from now, iPhone images containing little of the immediate nostalgia young adults of my generation will associate with home video.

This metafictional approach also allows the film to sidestep the usual hallmarks of the genre — featuring several impassioned speeches reminiscing about traits of the deceased— in favour of a more subtle and tactile experience. When the waterworks finally flow, it is through a remarkably simple yet devastating gesture, all the more so thanks to the film’s earlier restraint. Sad without being depressing, funny while avoiding whimsy, compassionate but not cloying, its careful modulation of mood shows a fine command of tone from first-time feature director Dovilė Šarutytė.

A Feature Film About Life plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Getting Away With Murder(s)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s something about the enormity of the issues involved here that makes this a very tough watch. (If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong. The Holocaust is not an easy issue to deal with. Films about it can consequently be tough to watch. And so they should be.) That combined with the near three-hour running time (this is not a complaint, honest) means it sat on my pending review pile for quite a while before I finally sat down and watched it.

I suspect Wilkinson is aware of this problem. As the film starts, he takes you (as it were) gently by the hand as he walks into Auschwitz and matter-of-factly discusses its horrors, helped by a man who works in the museum there and has probably helped numerous people before and since to come to terms with the implications of the place as they go round it. Insofar as one ever can.

We learn of the arrivals off the incoming cattle trucks who were told to go down the ten-minute walk to the showers to get themselves cleaned up. They would take off their clothes and fold them neatly so they could pick them up again afterwards. They were herded into the shower interiors, quite densely packed. And they never came out because these weren’t showers at all, but gas chambers used for the systematic elimination of many of the new arrivals. It’s sickening just to think about.

The people who herded them in were inmates themselves. If you were told you could do that job or join them in the gas chambers yourself, what would you do? [A quick aside: the extraordinary and brilliant subjective camera drama Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) goes a long way to understanding an inmate who does this job. Not that that’s possible.] As I say, trying to comprehend the inhumanity of this is really, really hard. These inmate-workers would be told, “the only way out of here is through the chimney.”

The screen shows well-put together maps of the place and gruelling archive footage is presented throughout the film in a non-confrontational, non-sensationalised way which helps. However, this material is, on the most fundamental human level, horrible. There’s a part of you that just wants to get away from the screen and throw up. People shouldn’t treat each other like this. Yet history testifies that they do, and we should never forget the fact. It’s the reason we need films like this, and the reason you need to watch it. Lest we forget, as they say.

Which implies that we know it all already. For myself, though, there is much in this film I didn’t know. Ranging from specific details about perpetrators large and small in the overall process that was the Holocaust right the way through to the scale of the operation (six million Jews turns out both an oversimplification and an understatement) and all the complicated ins and outs of the legal aftermath of the attempts both to track down and administer justice to the numerous perpetrators alongside the numerous attempts of all those involved to evade justice, all to often successfully. Much of what’s shown here is an indictment of humanity, although all the way through there are signs of hope as perpetrators are convicted and justice done. But it seems that too many get (got) off scot free or with woefully inadequate punishment for their appalling crimes. It’s not surprising that someone should want to make a film to address the burning question about the injustice of all this. Kudos to Wilkinson for doing so.

It may make for harrowing and deeply upsetting viewing, but at the same time, it’s consistently compelling. And it absolutely screams out to be seen.

After Auschwitz we move on to France, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria and, eventually, Germany. In his own county of Yorkshire which has a population of 5.4 million, Wilkinson attempts to get his head round the sheer enormity of the figures. For comparison, both Denmark and the US State of Maryland have populations of six million. If all those in Yorkshire were killed, he asks, would the UK government remain silent?

York, where the film has its premiere, is the site of England’s largest massacre of Jews in 1190, when some 150 were killed. Lest we think such things could never happen here.

Wilkinson also travels to Galway, Ireland to see the grave of William Joyce who broadcast German propaganda during the war as Lord Hawhaw. He was captured, tried and, in 1946, executed. His case is comparatively cut and dried compared to what happened to those Germans who abetted the Holocaust.

After Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the shock of what they found in the death camps, the Allies vowed to bring the Holocaust’s perpetrators to justice. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg is often cited, but in fact that was held in a building with the capacity to house no more than 24 defendants of whom three never made it to trial and only 12 received the death sentence.

Matters were scarcely helped by the Nazis’ use of law under the Third Reich. Prior to that, law in most European countries had been based on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, but the regime effectively suspended such considerations, creating a legal framework under which it was permissible to eliminate specific ethnic and other minorities. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ didn’t exist until its instigation for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-6.

Other trials followed, but the Allies failed to keep up the momentum as they became more concerned with the growing threat of the Soviets and the rise of the Cold War than with hunting down Nazi war criminals when Germany was economically on its knees. Finishing the job within Germany’s borders was left largely to Germany itself.

Where East Germany, as a newly formed Communist state, rebuilt its judiciary from scratch with entirely new appointments, West Germany retained many judges who had been in post during the Nazi era, many of whom were somewhat sympathetic to the murderers in the dock. In a very real sense, the post-war, West German judiciary had became Nazified.

Thus, in later West German trials, while some of the murderers received the full force of the law in the death penalty, many sentences were much more lenient or subsequently commuted so that, for example, a 20 year sentence became five years. There are also examples of murderers living in Germany who were never prosecuted, or who got off during a trial using the most spurious of defences. In many cases, these were people living under their real names.

Others fled, most infamously to South America, but to other countries as well, including the UK. In recent years, in his retirement, Nazi hunter Dr. Stephen Ankier researched their whereabouts, often to find the perpetrators he unearthed die of illness or old age before they could be brought to trial. The UK’s record on finding and prosecuting the perpetrators has been poor.

Getting Away With Murder(s) had its premiere on Thursday 9th November in at the Everyman Cinema, York. Dates for further screenings around the UK are constantly being added: click here to see if your town or city is listed yet. If it isn’t, then tell your local cinema you want to see it.

The film is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 1st, the 75th anniversary of the end of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Review originally published on Jeremy C. Processing. Reprinted by permission.