Saturday | May 25 | 16:30 | Cinematheque 4
screenings and masterclass
One of the world’s most prominent documentary filmmakers, Audrius Stonys is a director, producer, and lecturer, as well as a trailblazer within the Baltic school of poetic documentary filmmaking. A native of Vilnius, Stonys began his filmmaking career during Lithuania’s transition to independence, and his oeuvre can be described as an autobiography of duality. While deeply rooted in the locations and their history, his work manages to rise above time, reflecting a constant preoccupation with freedom—whether personal, collective, artistic, or ethical. Freedom itself becomes the primary tool in Stonys’ masterful films, where he experiments, marvels at, ponders, and is captivated by the world around him, making unique connections between the material and the spiritual, and between reality and poetry. As a tribute to Stonys, the festival will screen seven of his feature and short films and hold a masterclass with him.
The masterclass will take place on Saturday | May 25 | 16:30 | Cinematheque 4| moderated by Dr. Ohad Landesman.
As the faded, frozen landscape speeds by her, a little girl sits in the back seat of a car, looking straight ahead as an old man drives. The camera tries to decipher the emotion reflected in her big eyes. Is she sad, lost in thought, or filled with anticipation?
In the 1960s, behind the Iron Curtain, a new generation of Baltic filmmakers brought a different reading of reality to the screen, transforming documentary filmmaking into a groundbreaking form of poetic art.
Moments of interaction between people, animals, and their surroundings are translated into incredibly evocative and visually powerful cinematic fragments in the film that unveiled Audrius Stonys' singular poetic perspective on reality.
In a bathhouse in a small hotel in Lithuania, Audrius Stonys' camera discovers the intoxicating beauty of bare skin surrendering to nature's healing powers.
In the beautiful Georgian landscape, an inspirational meditative look at Ramin, an ex-wrestler whose body may be old but his spirit is young and full of life.
This is the portrait of a place—a glacier of immense proportions—and a woman—a Lithuanian scientist dedicating her life to studying the effects of climate change on the glacier. It is a wordless story about yearning for solitude and nature's boundless beauty.
This meditative essay is a collection of meticulously crafted and enchanting scenes, each exploring situations where the human body—sweaty, wrinkled, stretching, decaying—tries to achieve harmony with its surroundings.
