COUNTDOWN / TAS, KURIO NÉRA
LITHUANIA 2004
Director: Audrius Stonys, 45 MIN

Lithuanian filmmaker Audrius Stonys slowly circles his subject, approaching it from a historic distance. First he interviews people who had once worked with the man he is about to portray: former Lithuanian filmmaker Augustinas Baltrusaitis. The witnesses from the past do not even know if he is still alive, and at first, the filmmaker does not volunteer any information either – only the statements of a fellow inmate of the home, in which he now lives, show us that the man’s life is now limited to a miserable housing-block. A bitter old man who admits to having made the wrong decisions and claims to have no friends – only a television. Even though he was considered rather talented when he worked on director Grigori Kosintzev’s Shakespeare-adaptations, HAMLET and KING LEAR. But when Baltrusaitis decided to make a film of his own, he failed – why doesn’t become clear, but apparently the political circumstances didn’t help. One can also see this film as a very private memoir of the time when Lithuania was oppressed by the communist regime of the Soviet Union. But most of all Stonys wants to tell us about forgetting. A human existence, a person who once had friends, relatives, ends up in the no man’s land of a retirement home, where nobody knows what turned this man into the unforgettable individual that in effect everybody is – whatever may become of them.

Caligari: 09.04. / 1.30 p.m.