This year’s Scanorama will take place under exceptional conditions dictated by the pandemic. Nevertheless, we are determined to take the bold step and combine the possibility of showing films in cinemas with shifting some parts of the program online. We feel inspired by the successful example of the San Sebastián Festival, when Spain, a country particularly hit by Covid-19, decided to return to the natural and long-awaited version of screening films in actual cinemas. The festival proved to be a triumph, making a series of thoughtful but cautious decisions and taking a step forward after the silence of other major festivals. The success of the San Sebastián inspires us to show courage in difficult circumstances. This festival is also important to Scanorama because of the film that won four of its major awards: the Georgian-French co-production “Beginning” (dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili). I’m glad that this film, giving a new meaning to the lack of sensitivity in society and opening up an interesting direction in the search for cinematic language, is also one of the main favorites of this year’s Scanorama.
Next to this subtle director, who won the Golden Shell for best film at the San Sebastián, there is a line of strong knockout films. The soloists are two - the German director Oskar Roehler’s “Enfant Terrible” from this year’s Cannes main program and the Russian directors Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel’s film “DAU. Natasha”, which became an important event in the last Berlinale. Both films drastically transcend traditional conventions and dangerously balance between fiction and reality. The personality of German new wave icon Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose unruly self-expression is the engine of the “Enfant Terrible”, prompted Roehler to create a temperamental phantasmagoria that teases the viewer with Fassbinder’s recognizability and exposes his flaws and strengths without claiming to say the final word about this cinema genius. The end is straightforward: the flaming torch of creativity goes out, leaving an impregnable secret of the personality and the circumstances of its physical death.
Khrzhanovskiy’s huge interdisciplinary DAU project covers cinema and anthropology in a broader sense. “DAU. Natasha” is just one of the films in this project. The director penetrates the depths of the mind and provokes extreme sensations to reveal the spiritual world of human destroyed by totalitarian oppression. A radical, ruthless gaze leaves no hope. In a pandemic world, films often resemble the screaming of a man falling into the abyss. These paraphrases also color Agnieszka Holland’s “Charlatan”.
An alternative to such radical cinema could be films full of touching humanity, albeit different in every other sense. Among them is Christian Petzold’s “Undine”, a unique modern myth of life, love, death and the city where the modern version of the mythological sea creature - the historian, museum guide Undine - lives; the Serbian director Srdan Golubovic’s “Father”, whose hero sets out on a 300-kilometer walk to Belgrade to find his lost children; and the Swiss directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s “My Little Sister”, an adult version of “Hansel and Gretel”, in which the evil witch is probably the most popular disease of this century. The opening film “Sweat” (dir. Magnus von Horn) will find a special place in the hearts of those in search for sensitivity. The director’s answer to a very popular question “Who needs friends if you have 600,000 followers?” is the story of loneliness and spiritual stagnation of the pretty fitness trainer Silvia. Yes, you need them. You need sensitivity as you need bread - a title of an old Lithuanian documentary comes to mind. And it’s not just popularity-crazed Silvia who needs it. Everyone does.
Selected latest Scandinavian films in the program “News from the North” will also continue and vary this theme. It will also appear in Thomas Vinterberg’s dramatic but full of joie de vivre “Another Round”, and in the rebellion program “Whatever Works” with Matteo Garrone’s “Pinocchio”, exploring and expanding the boundaries of the family film, and Margreth Olin’s painful documentary “Self-Portrait”. Films from different programs will fascinate, shock, attract, repel and provoke viewers to test the amplitude of their own emotional reactions. This year’s Scanorama’s program is too diverse to fit into one word, but I believe that everyone will find something dear and close to themselves.
Due to pandemic restrictions our guests won’t be coming, so we chose remote communication at the industrial event “Sca kryptys”, which offers a very rich program this year. The international jury of the short film competition program “New Baltic Cinema” will also work online. However, we hope to be able to focus on our Lithuanian programs, home discussions and the latest national premieres - Jurgis Matulevičius’ “Isaac” and “The Golden Flask”, Linas Mikuta’s “Roman’s Childhood”, Jokūbas Vilius Tūras’ “Holy Time” and Spanish, Icelandic and Lithuanian co-production “Lobster Soup”, which was co-authored and produced by our documentary film director Arūnas Matelis. “Lithuanian Cinema” program will also be vivid and interesting. We will focus on the memory of director and screenwriter Vytautas Žalakevičius and anniversary greetings to his actor Juozas Budraitis. We will show a retrospective of three films important to Žalakevičius and Lithuanian cinema - Budraitis also plays in one of them - and our anniversary greetings will be accompanied by “The Lanfier Colony”, virtually unseen in Lithuania, created by Mosfilm and the Czech Barrandov Studios in 1969 (dir. Jan Schmidt), in which Budraitis played the leading role. Thanks to this film, the Lithuanian actor, unknown on the other side of the Iron Curtain, attracted the eye of the legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Budraitis himself will share the story about that encounter. Let’s meet and briefly forget what we heard in the news this morning or evening. Come together.
Sincerely Yours
Gražina Arlickaitė
