Tag: Sarunas Bartas

Our dirty questions to Šarūnas Bartas

Posted on by victorfraga

During the recent San Sebastian International Film Festival, we managed to get some time to sit with Lithuania’s foremost director Šarūnas Bartas and discuss his latest film Into the Dusk. This is a period picture set in 1948 that depicts the Russian occupation of Lithuania following WW2. It follows the relationship between homesteader Pliaugai’s family and the group of partisan rebels encamped in the nearby backwoods.

What follows is a primer to the historical context of the film and how the film was inspired by Bartas’s adolescence, growing up in the shadow of Lithuania’s Soviet occupation. The fate and background of certain characters is outlined in detail and as such the interview is best used as a companion piece to the film itself, to flesh out some of the more obtuse elements from this quiet but affecting piece.

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Charles Williams – I imagine that In the Dusk refers to the dusk of the war, after the frontline fighting has finished. This is kind of the twilight that follows. Is that where you’re coming from yourself with the title?

Šarūnas Bartas – Yeah, I was. I was born when the last partisan was killed – at the same moment, more or less – there was resistance for a few decades. In the beginning it was stronger, much more organised. This is the resistance against Soviet occupation but, year by year, these people were destroyed and one decade later they still were in the forest with weapons and so on. Everyone was waiting for the Russians to leave, to move away. Not only us but all the world was almost sure that after WW2 they would leave the Eastern European territories, but they didn’t. They went an absolutely different way. They took a part of Berlin, they cut it into pieces.

CW – I was going to ask about the overall plan of the partisans shown in the film. There doesn’t seem to be much organisation beyond waiting for things to blow over.

SB – It’s normal. There are three years already passed being in the forest, not being able to show up somewhere in the village in the daytime or something.

CW- No idea how many other groups are left as well, no communication between the cells.

SB – They were still connecting somehow but it was always more and more difficult. In 1948 it was already clear that nothing would happen.

CW – From a British perspective, when you hear of men in the woods, resisting, we have the legend of Robin Hood and the Merry Men. But in their case it was just resisting a local landlord as opposed to a monolithic Empire and the scale is so different.

SB – Well, just imagine if part of England was occupied by Nazis. People somehow would try to resist them.

CW – Whilst we’re on the partisan group, I was interested in their names. ‘Dollar’, ‘boar’ – are these names accurate depictions of real rebels?

SB – They had codenames. Most of them had different names, like ‘Eagle’.

CW – The partisans of the film are such a small group, they can’t really afford to be so vicious on how they internally police themselves. When there are executions for infractions, removing some of their number, it’s not something they can really afford to do but they are trying to uphold their principles.

SB – In the very beginning the USSR was weak, having just taken Berlin. But they were there. With their armies, their horses. I show the biggest group of people that might be hiding and not traced easily. You have to supply the food, there is snow all the time leaving footsteps. You hear stories from the people who live around who supply them with food… They leave traces so they go on purpose into the wood.

CW – The more people you have the more exponential the difficulty of hiding them.

SB – Normally it was five or six people who live there and also the forests are not so deep. They had to create an infrastructure of collaborators.

CW – Could you explain the situation of Inges, the farmhand who works there? It seems he wasn’t paid anything except a place to stay, some food from the farm… The whole talk about giving him land – that would have been his only payment?

SB – No, normally they were all paid, the workers, but we didn’t show that they buy some stuff, you know? Like some food.

CW – It seemed very similar to the situation of Unte’s parents. Pliaugai said they were poor, working on a farm. On the one hand he is generous to take in Unte but on the other he is not willing to award some land to Inges which could be construed as his eventual downfall, when the communists roll in and parcel up the land, offering it as reward to collaborators… Perhaps if he had been more open-handed?

SB – Eventually it was a lie, a huge lie. Nobody gave the land to anyone. All the lands were taken and all these people, like Pliaugai, they went to Siberia and they died there.

CW – That is Pliaugai’s fate, following the events of the film?

SB – Finally they took all the land. When I was a teenager, all the land belonged to the government. All the flats belonged to the government. You could have one car, one car for one family – not more. It was like a prison. Before, okay, they were shouting that they would give the land to those who would work on it. But it was a huge lie. That lie was used to get rid of people who were wealthy and somehow be a danger to the regime.

CW – Are any of these stories inspired by personal family stories recounted to you directly? Partisan family members throughout the years?

SB – A lot of stories I heard in my childhood, from my great-grandparents. I had five which I remember, and grandparents. They were telling every day, all the time.

CW – Have you been doing a lot of research personally in order to o get the specifics of In the Dusk?

SB – We had to do the research but in Soviet times there was every year a thick book of Soviet union history and one thin book for all years of Lithuanian history. That’s when I was in school but now it’s different times and I was mostly reading diaries of partisans. Which were written not later, and not before. They were written in the bunkers, in the forests. Diaries, just diaries that show that exact moment.

Still there are partisans that are alive these days but there isn’t much use in talking to them. They forget a lot, they are very old people already, and also they were speaking about that so many times it becomes almost a cliché to them.

CW – In your film, the partisans keep diaries, and listen to transmissions from the US, from President Truman. Is this a reflection of their composition as formerly well-educated people with land?

SB – They were printing papers, they were spreading them in the villages, the country, the city. It wasn’t finished until 1991. There were several editions of underground newspapers, very difficult to find but they were still going when I was 20 or 19. Mostly they went through the church.

CW – They were finding out the news from the church?

SB – In church it was easier to cover the dissemination. It was the Vatican church, we have a different church. We are Catholics and Russians are Orthodox.

CW – Are you looking to do more period filming? Depending on the stories that come to mind?

SB – Long ago we had a historical film about the Middle Ages… I don’t know.

CW – Finally, what is in the berry juice that they’re always drinking?

SB – It’s not a juice, it’s something else. There’s no equivalent. It’s a starch water but not so liquid, you add juice and it’s a little heavy. Like a jelly but it’s not completely jelly. It’s still popular in Lithuania today. [This turned out to be the unappetising-looking kissel]

The two images at the top are of Šarūnas Bartas, snapped by Montse Castillo. the other two are stills from ‘In The Dusk’.

In the Dusk (Sutemose)

Posted on by victorfraga

It starts as it means to go on. Terse, close conversations between the inhabitants of a farmhouse and establishing shots of a Lithuanian countryside that is the opposite of verdant. Sparse scrubland mirrors the fortunes of its inhabitants as the Soviet Union holds uneasy control of the territory. Landowner Pliauga ekes a living for his family, a formerly bourgeouis wife, brought low by the destructions of the war, and their impassive son, Unte. They have a comparatively privileged position, actively imperilled by the USSR soldiers that hold the town and are promising arable hectares to collaborators in line with their communist ideals. You can guess where this land is to come from.

Pliauga is a man of some contradictions. Urging Unte to pursue truth as holy, he nonetheless finds time for chaste kisses with housemaid Agne. Their land is worked by Ignas, an indentured servant with little pay beyond bed and board. Early on he invents a story of offering the man a parcel of his own which was turned down out of ‘laziness’. Yet, he is clearly not immune to the plight of the average Lithuanian man and supports a local rebel band of fighters who rail against annexation with midnight meals and carts of supplies.

This is foremost a story of rebellion. The battered partisan warriors inhabit a tattered camp in the forest, entirely reliant on the goodwill and closed lips of their neighbours. It is a far cry from the organised and successful resistance of the Viet Cong against their encroaching superpower enemy. Thin woodland of narrow trees cannot compare to dense jungle and the group is small by necessity, totalling six hardened men plus a too-young girl. Later, a single truck rolls into town bearing a contingent of Soviet soldiers three times as strong. In the face of the monolithic red army and Soviet Union, what plan can there be except to wait out the enemy. The withdrawal of troops was the prevailing school of thought, evidenced by radio transmission picked up from President Truman. Hindsight, eh?

Unte moves freely between his home and their camp, to the consternation of his father. Having grown up in these conditions, Unte seems at a loss as to why people fight to their last and comes to an understanding far too late. The partisans have the authentic look of non-actors and are codenamed with monikers like Dollar or Boar – a small act of control rather than a fear of being outed. Where else have they to go? It is unclear if they have contact with a wider network or are possibly even the last node of resistance in the whole country.

In the West, the image of the Berlin wall is the most recognisable symbol of the Cold War – a brusque concrete bisection of the city and its peoples over the political machinations of the Soviet Union and the US. Yet, the wall was erected some 15-plus years after the end of WW2. Time in which the USSR consolidated its position through subjugation and terror. It’s easy to imagine that little to no footage of Lithuania escaped the blackout Iron Curtain in those years. Films like Sutemose can help illuminate Lithuanian history and contextualise the geopolitics of now, some 70 years on. However, it can be a slog; perhaps reflecting the drudgery faced by these outlaw partisans. The wheel turns to a flashpoint eventually but overall the film is long, deliberate, and light on exposition. Character motivations can seem unclear but the ambient storytelling gives all the right pieces – time taken to puzzle over Sutemose after a first viewing makes the experience more rewarding on reflection.

In the Dusk has just premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival:

Frost (Šerkšnas)

Posted on by victorfraga

A Lithuanian man meets two Ukrainian men. But this is no ordinary meeting – the Lithuanian man has just narrowly avoided being shot at after almost driving through a military checkpoint in the Donetsk province (in Donbass, the predominantly ethnic Russian region of the Ukraine, central to the Ukrainian Crisis of 2013/14). Auteur Šarūnas Bartas’s tenth feature film Frost takes us on an 1,800 km road trip from Lithuania to eastern Ukraine. Along the way, it provides a gorgeously-landscaped meditation on the cold complexities of war and national identity.

The film opens with a brief street conversation between Rokas (Mantas Jančiauskas) and an unnamed friend. The friend has been voluntarily delivering humanitarian aid to Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbass conflict, but is unable to deliver the next batch. He asks Rokas to drive to Kiev and drop off the cargo with some other volunteers. Without much consideration, Rokas agrees and takes his girlfriend Inga (Lyja Maknaviciute) with him. They drive to the Polish-Ukrainian border, where a journalist Andrei (Andrzej Chyra) helps them to enter the Ukraine. After discovering that the Kiev volunteers have moved on, Rokas decides to take the long – and perilous – journey to Donetsk. Along the way, he stays with Andrei and assorted journalists in Dnipro, meets some sombre soldiers in the Donbass borderlands and finally arrives on the fractured frontline.

These three meetings are essential to Rokas’s intellectual development and the film’s broader commentary around war. The first meeting in Dnipro displays the worst excesses of international conflict journalism. In typical Bartas style, Rokas stays largely silent when Andrei introduces him to the group of war correspondents and photographers. However, his sullen suspiciousness indicates that he is ill at ease sipping wine and whiskey in an upmarket hotel, when there is a humanitarian mission to fulfill.

The second meeting in a makeshift Donbass military outpost is deeply moving and switches the mood into hyperreal docudrama. The scene involves an inquisitive Rokas talking to two weary Ukrainian men about the nature of war. The two men are soldiers, inasmuch as they wear uniforms, and are tasked with removing dead bodies – friendly and enemy – from the battlefield. The dialogue is expertly played in a way that throws up the utter moral dilemma of war, without being a preachy lesson in ethics. Indeed, the two men are not actors, but actual soldiers and this contributes to the striking authenticity of the conversation.

By the time Rokas is on his way to the final meeting, his inquisitiveness is starting to get the better of him. Rokas is now using his phone to film and take photos of the destruction of Donetsk province. It is initially unclear whether Rokas is transitioning from a naïve volunteer to a roving war reporter. However, his subsequent interactions with soldiers on the frontline suggest a morbidly voyeuristic fascination with the conflict. Ultimately, Rokas comes full-circle and is as much an out-of-touch tourist as the journalists he previously despised.

The film acts primarily as an exploration of war from the bubble of an EU perspective. This is both eye-opening and positively human, as each character displays an entirely familiar range of virtues and vices. It also broadcasts Ukraine and the Donbass crisis to an EU audience that have now largely forgotten about the fortunes of their largest European neighbours. Although Frost doesn’t detail the experiences of the Donbass separatists, it leaves you with no doubt that the everyday allegiances of this war are arbitrary and ambiguous. Where documentaries such as Netflix’s Winter on Fire (Evgeny Afineevsky, 2015) are incredibly informative, yet brazenly biased, Frost gives space for the viewer to independently appraise their position.

In spite of this, the film can feel somewhat ponderous when Rokas and Inga are on the road. This is largely a result of Inga’s diminished role and Rokas’s unclear motivations. It’s possible that Rokas exists as a young, multilingual and rudderless conduit for Lithuanian national identity. It’s also possible that Rokas exists as a blank slate for the viewer to project their own interpretations onto. Nevertheless, the feeling pervades that developed dialogue between Rokas and Inga could have given a sharper narrative touch. Bartas is known for stripping his early films of dialogue and narrative. But in a film where other characters’ talk clearly drives the story forward, the silence between the central couple is decisively deafening.

Frost is a unique piece of cinema in 2017. It focuses attention back onto a divided region that has become absent from the popular European imagination. Likewise, it provokes meaningful reflection on the moral dilemma of war, without being overtly instructive. Its slight tendency for tedious travel is punctuated by powerful prose in the three key interludes. It ends on a low-key whimper, but one that will explode through your thoughts long after the end credits.

Frost is showing as part of the ArteKino Festival, an entirely free online film fest taking place between December 1st and 17th. You too can view it at home by clicking here.

Sarunas Bartas is one of DMovies‘ favourite filmmakers. His early 1997 film The House, which is entirely devoid of narrative and dialogue, is a constant source of inspirations for our dirty work.