Aldona Bendoriute

Feature Film About Life

It is highly probable that before their own death, everyone has to organise someone else’s funeral. This is by far not an easy task. In addition to the searing grief, dying also brings a number of tasks that are at once utterly alien and intensely time-critical. The main character of this film, Dovile, who unexpectedly has to bury her father, has to face the bedlam of exactly such a challenge. Overnight, the young girl has to become a skilful organiser of a family event, while also being a specialist on coffins, urns, wreaths and funeral feasts. Dovile’s journey towards organising a perfect funeral is inevitably full of hardship and mishaps, accompanied mainly by black humour and comical situations.

Wolf Children

The story of a boy who, driven by the search for his lost brother in the turmoil of WWII, joins a group of children in order to survive the chaos of post-war anarchy in the haunted forests of Lithuania.

The Excursionist

A true story about an 11-year-old girl named Maria who makes her way back home to Lithuania from Siberia.

Defiance

Based on a true story, during World War II, four Jewish brothers escape their Nazi-occupied homeland of West Belarus in Poland and join the Soviet partisans to combat the Nazis. The brothers begin the rescue of roughly 1,200 Jews still trapped in the ghettos of Poland.

Emilia

Soviet Lithuania in 1972. A young theatre actress is trying to make a difference and tell the forbidden story of repression in a play.

Owl Mountain

Radio Free Europe, BBC, and Voice of America can only rarely get through the Iron Curtain and Soviet mufflers to Lithuania, a country torn by a war between the local resistance movement and the Soviet regime that is forced onto Lithuanian people by bayonets of the Russian army. Everybody who tries to resist the Soviet rule is either terrorized or executed or exiled to Siberia. He is one of the local high-school students who witness the local armed resistance to the Soviet occupation and ultimately decide to join it by taking a gun into their hands. He collects documents and all possible kinds of evidence that prove daunting crimes of the Kremlin. He soon becomes a legend among his peers. To girls, he is John Wayne the Hollywood Icon. Guys see him as an insurmountable obstacle and an invincible rival in matters of love.

The Noisemaker

A provincial school is waiting for an official delegation from the Ministry who is supposed to bring a new bell. But a bell is not what the school needs... Struggling to survive, the institution is currently lacking the two pupils required by governmental quota in order to stay open. Anticipating the arrival of the delegation, the principal tries his best to hide the real number of students to avoid the unavoidable closing down of the school.

I Know You

The story of a fifteen-year old girl who feels that her room, her district, her school and even herself is too small for her.

Utterly Alone

The film portrays Lukša's attempts, in trips to western Europe, to gain support for the armed anti-Soviet resistance (known as the Forest Brothers), whose fortunes in a guerrilla war against Soviet authorities were waning, largely due to widespread infiltration and harsh crackdowns by the NKVD.