Gražina Arlickaitė
Scanorama opens its 24th season with a remarkable constellation of creative encounters: Markus Schleinzer and the phenomenal Sandra Hüller (Rose); Marie Kreutzer and French stars Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve (Gentle Monster); German cinema legend Ulrike Ottinger and the incomparable Isabelle Huppert (The Blood Countess); Hans Petter Moland and Knut Hamsun (Growth of the Soil); Grant Gee and jazz genius Bill Evans (Everybody Digs Bill Evans); and Lance Hammer and Juliette Binoche (Queen at Sea).
Those seeking prize-winners from the world’s leading festivals will find them across the programme. We are proud to present winners from Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sundance and Karlovy Vary, but we are even more excited by the debut filmmakers in our Main Competition, whose work this year reveals remarkable artistic maturity and has already earned international recognition. Sweden’s Julia Thelin, Norway’s Eivind Landsvik, French filmmakers Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier, Germany’s Kai Stänicke, and Pristina-born, Germany-based Visar Morina have all made a striking international impression with their first features. Joining them in the competition are Lithuanian director Rinaldas Tomaševičius, Georgia’s Ana Urushadze, Belgium’s Isabelle Tollenaere, Croatia’s Mate Ugrin and France’s Lana Daher.
Cinema today has become a laboratory of humanity, a place where values are put to the test – some shattered, others fiercely preserved. The convulsions of a world scarred by war (Salvation, dir. Emin Alper; Traces, dirs. Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk; Mariinka, dir. Pieter-Jan De Pue), stories of injustice and humiliation (Visar Morina’s harrowing Main Competition entry Shame and Money; Maria Sødahl’s The Last Resort, named Best Nordic Film of the Year), and the theft of another person’s identity (Julia Thelin’s The Patron and Polish director Grzegorz Dębowski’s What Belongs to Others) cast the ideas of theft, amorality and adaptation in unexpected new light. The films selected from across Scanorama’s programmes in this unsettled year meet not only in dialogue, but also in confrontation. Cinema continually tests our ability to see the world from different perspectives, becoming both part of our lives and a means of reflecting on them. In encountering the other, we unexpectedly recognise ourselves (Erik Poppe’s Beloved; Carlos Saiz Espín’s Lionel; Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea). Painful and complex, yet grounded in clear-eyed realism, these dramas tell us about ourselves and the many forms that a modern individual’s confrontation with evil can take.
Chronology seems to matter less as these films move effortlessly across centuries, linking different eras and revealing the preservation of values and personal moral integrity as timeless, universal concerns (Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess, Bérenger Thouin’s Golden Age, Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales). Cinema bears witness to the wounds of the world by insisting on the significance of facts and events, posing questions and inviting us all to seek answers. What does it mean today to survive, to stand together? Amid the horrors of catastrophe, war and despair, where can we find something to hold on to – and the hope that comes from a belief in our shared humanity (You Don’t Belong Here, dir. Florin Șerban; Mariinka, dir. Pieter-Jan De Pue)?
Films are delving ever deeper beneath the surface of the human mind, unafraid to uncover the roots of evil, aggression and criminality (Gentle Monster, dir. Marie Kreutzer; 3 Weeks After, dir. Miroslav Terzić; Salvation, dir. Emin Alper). The stories they tell are often painful, bitterly ironic or tragic. Yet it is precisely within them that we find the hope that another way must be possible (Prosecution, dir. Faraz Shariat; I Want to Be Human, dir. Rinaldas Tomaševičius; Under a Bad Star, dirs. Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier; Trial of Hein, dir. Kai Stänicke).
The Winding Paths of Identity
Private, intimate space – whether in centuries past or today – becomes an arena in which identity must be preserved. To reclaim her property in seventeenth-century Germany, Rose must become a man, assuming another identity in order to survive. Today, the motives for changing identity are different. In Grzegorz Dębowski’s What Belongs to Others, the burglar Kasia sets out to rob a man, only to find him dead. She is tempted to steal his life story as well, but once the initial shock subsides, she begins to delve into his past and eventually understands that she cannot live someone else’s life. She must transform her own story if she is to become who she is – or who she wants to be. And that is no easy path. Julia Thelin’s Main Competition debut, The Patron, offers a compelling portrait of an apparently harmless impostor: a housekeeper who poses as an art patron, borrowing her employer’s status and slipping playfully into the role without considering where it might lead. She stages a distinctly contemporary masterclass in hypocrisy, drawing into it naïve young artists hungry for self-expression and easily taken in by her deception. Does she win? On the surface, yes. But what comes next?
Ainara, the young Spanish protagonist of Sundays (dir. Alauda Ruiz de Azúa), is also searching for her true identity. Her decision to enter a convent rather than attend university leaves her family stunned: not even her parents had sensed the course her inner search was taking. Without the support of her family, Lea, who is growing up in eastern Germany in Home Stories (dir. Eva Trobisch), tries to piece together her own story of home and identity – not only for television, but above all for herself.
More unsettling still, a person’s true identity may be deliberately concealed behind a public façade that everyone finds acceptable. In Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, the life of an artistic family shatters when the police arrive and accuse the father – whom the family has been carefully shielding as he recovers from creative burnout – of possessing child sexual abuse material on his computer, with all the legal consequences that follow. His wife, a celebrated pianist, their young son and his sceptical artist mother-in-law are left reeling. What began as a retreat to the countryside in search of peace becomes not a cure but a curse as the ground gives way beneath them. Panic, fear and suspicion taint everything that had seemed true and beautiful. The story asks when a person is ever truly themselves. What – and whom – can we trust? Following the success of Kreutzer’s acclaimed Corsage, an actor who appeared in the film was charged with possession of the same kind of material. Perhaps the case lent further urgency to the sensitive subject of her new film. Kreutzer examines it from neither the victim’s nor the offender’s perspective, focusing instead on how such a revelation affects those closest to them and how they might withstand something that threatens to destroy them from within. The heroine of Woman Unknown, the Golden Lion-winning film by Danish director May el-Toukhy, also harbours a profound secret. Mathilde Arcel, who plays her, brought the film a second Venice honour, winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.
Cinema can also become a form of meditation on identity, non-being and collective disarray, as it does in Conference of the Birds by German-Iranian director Amin Motallebzadeh. In Spanish filmmaker Xacio Baño’s After the Cities, the storied city of Santiago de Compostela becomes the subject of a collective exploration of identity, pieced together from the letters, postcards and memories of those who journeyed there. In Mauricio Freyre’s General States, seeds removed in the nineteenth century and destined to return home to Peru become a metaphor for South America’s neocolonial structures. Yet it is their very return that reveals how powerfully those structures continue to operate. The need to reclaim a working-class identity is evoked by Summer Drift, a hybrid of documentary and fiction by French and Swiss filmmakers Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter. A related act of reclamation can be found in Latvian documentarian Laila Pakalniņa’s Cat on My Mind. An archive of black-and-white negatives discovered beside a rubbish container inspired her to create an experimental tribute to analogue photography and the visual identity of twentieth-century Latvia. Finally, Márta Mészáros’s Diary cycle, presented in the Focus programme, is a moving portrait of a self taking shape over the course of an entire life.
Surprises, Unexpected Turns and Other Curiosities
The seven-month artistic experiment undertaken by Juliette Binoche and choreographer Akram Khan ultimately became the acclaimed actress’s directorial debut. In In-I In Motion, two exceptional artists create a singular cinematic fusion of dance, performance and acting. Whether or not one chooses to call it cinema, the result is a dazzling and spellbinding spectacle.
We more or less know what to expect from Radu Jude. Yet even he can surprise us with his choices. First published in 1900, Octave Mirbeau’s novel The Diary of a Chambermaid now returns to the screen for a fourth time, following adaptations by Renoir, Buñuel and Jacquot. Presented in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Jude’s film of the same title freely reworks the novel as a contemporary satire on the absurdities of migrant life abroad. His Romanian protagonist, who works as a nanny in France, rehearses the same text for a theatre production, adapting it with just as much freedom as Jude himself. The Romanian provocateur remains committed to criticism and irony, but the register of his satire has shifted: the tone is gentler, more forgiving and even empathetic.
In Red Rocks, Bruno Dumont ventures boldly towards the limits of the permissible, treating his young protagonists as miniature adults. As they compete with one another, they discover a world shaped not only by friendship but also by pain, and face trials far beyond their years. Such unexpected shifts and nuances lend the work of established filmmakers surprising new shades.
Three conceptually linked films in the Nocturnal Creatures programme reveal further unexpected nuances, departing in form from the traditional horror usually associated with this strand. The films by Marion Le Corroller from France, Carlos Conceição from Portugal and Ann Oren from Germany portray forms of bodily transformation that are not rooted in genre convention, but feel disturbingly plausible and increasingly familiar in contemporary life – no less frightening than pure horror.
The films in Open Borders, from Singapore, China, Mexico, Paraguay and Japan, unfold a vivid spectrum of aesthetic identities.
Alongside films from other continents, a vibrant current of Spanish cinema runs through this year’s festival. Spain is becoming an increasingly prominent presence at major international festivals, revealing the richness of its regional identities – a diversity we are delighted to share with our audiences.
One of the most exciting developments this year is the assured rise of Norwegian cinema and the international recognition it so richly deserves. Works by two Nobel laureates – Knut Hamsun and Jon Fosse – have inspired ambitious new films by two of Norway’s leading contemporary directors. Scanorama audiences are already familiar with Hans Petter Moland, whose skill and experience are evident in his assured handling of the expansive, many-layered narrative of Growth of the Soil, the novel for which Hamsun received the Nobel Prize. Moland retells it with remarkable clarity and contemporary resonance. It is the story of a strong man who withstands both the brutality of an unforgiving landscape and betrayal by the person closest to him, yet finds the strength to forgive and continue living by rules he has forged for himself. Unable to read, Isak learns not from books but from nature and its laws. On a remote stretch of land in northern Norway, he and the woman who becomes his wife build a home – a fortress of their own. Yet the forces of history inevitably close in, threatening the life they have created together.
At its world premiere in Toronto, the Norwegian team presented the film as “a powerful, richly textured and deeply affecting work, testament to the maturity of Norwegian cinema and the exceptional visibility and professional acclaim it has earned the country”. It was Moland’s distinctive combination of simplicity and force that led us, when shaping Scanorama’s programme, to follow the example of other festivals and give our most singular, high-impact films the special status of Gala screenings.
The recently released Beloved has an extraordinary backstory: its screenplay waited nearly three decades to reach the screen. Nobel laureate Jon Fosse wrote it in the late 1990s. “Ever since, it has sat on my desk, watching me,” director Erik Poppe says of the script by his longtime friend, which remained unfilmed for years. Nearly three decades later, the two friends returned to it together. The patient screenplay had finally found its moment: it became Beloved and reached Norwegian audiences this year. Under Poppe’s delicate direction, the script becomes a visually striking, beautifully composed love story about the fragility of relationships and the longing for perfection. The director remains true to his friend’s minimalist style. Asle and Gerda’s story unfolds not through dramatic turns of plot, but through long pauses, silences, spare dialogue and equally restrained existential reflection. Asle and Gerda fall in love and have a son, yet even together they remain apart. Asle is drawn to the sea, which asks nothing of him and grants him the freedom he craves. Gerda feels ever more acutely the loneliness within their life together. The film neither condemns nor absolves; instead, it quietly asks whether love can overcome the distance and estrangement that grow between two people who love one another. The eloquent beauty of the Norwegian landscape enfolds the story, as though seeking to reconcile two people whose love is slipping away.
Memory and the Present Intertwined
“Memory is what makes us human,” says director Grant Gee, whose Everybody Digs Bill Evans opens this year’s Scanorama. Winner of the Berlinale’s Best Director award, the film offers a sensitive portrait of the jazz legend’s turbulent life, set to the lucid, unforgettable sound of his music. In doing so, it reawakens our sense of art’s power to endure. The many layers of memory, so often examined by historians in theoretical terms, find vivid expression here in the interplay between the artist’s life and music – an arresting and beautifully resonant counterpoint.
The Open History of Lithuanian Cinema programme likewise seeks connections between past and present, reflecting on the events, phenomena, landmark dates and discourses of national film history that still await the attention of cinema historians.
Each year, the present reshapes the programme, drawing our attention to overlooked episodes in Lithuanian film history, the ways cultural memory was shaped and controlled during the Soviet period, and the distinctive voices our filmmakers developed within that system. It also invites us to remember those no longer with us, celebrate milestones and find humour in history’s occasional absurdities.
One strand of this year’s programme explores the end of the Soviet era and the possibilities that emerged in its wake. How did filmmakers make the transition from censorship to freedom of expression? How should we understand the extraordinary popularity Lithuanian actors once enjoyed throughout Soviet cinema? What vanished with the era – and what of lasting value has endured?
Scanorama’s decision to open the treasure chest of Soviet-era cinema was no accident. Archivists and film experts have delved into it to recover works whose value still endures. The prints preserved in our own archives are now often scarcely fit for screening. Yet films long left to gather dust are being restored and digitised by studios and film institutions across several former Soviet republics, now independent states. We are particularly interested in restored films featuring Lithuanian actors in leading roles. In 1967, while working in the Moldavian SSR, director Alexander Gordon cast Lithuanian actor Regimantas Adomaitis as the lead in Sergei Lazo. History has since come full circle: independent Moldova is now moving towards EU membership, while Moldova-Film is restoring and digitising the country’s cinematic heritage. This autumn, Scanorama audiences will be able to see a restored digital version of Sergei Lazo, made nearly six decades ago, dubbed into Romanian and subtitled in Lithuanian. To mark a milestone anniversary for director Algimantas Puipa, we will revisit the films he managed to steer safely past the censors as the Soviet era neared its end. We will honour the memory of Kostas Smoriginas and Béla Tarr, major artists whose loss is felt both in Lithuania and across Europe. We will also join the celebrations taking place across Europe to mark the centenary of Andrzej Wajda’s birth.
Co-Production Premieres
This year’s co-productions have been brought together in a dedicated strand of Lithuanian premieres. Approached from different perspectives, the troubled relationship between humanity and nature emerges as their defining theme.
La Pietà (dir. Rafa Molés and Pepe Andreu) is a sensitive meditation on Iceland’s vanishing glaciers and a reminder of humanity’s responsibility towards the natural world. In Baltic UXO (dir. Alexander Belinski and Agnė Dovydaitytė), the same theme returns as a rebuke from the Baltic Sea itself, gazing back at us through lenses clouded by a cataract of plastic. With lyrical restraint, Scarecrows (dir. Laila Pakalniņa) reflects on the fragile and complex relationship between technological ingenuity and nature, quietly inviting us to consider animal life at the threshold between freedom and captivity.
Following its world premiere at Cannes, Vesna, by Lithuanian-born director Rostislav Kirpichenko, will close this year’s Scanorama in Vilnius. The film confronts us with the merciless wounds of the war in Ukraine, where a church turned into a morgue becomes a priest’s last means of safeguarding the dignity of the dead.
The festival’s two flagship competitions – the Main Competition for feature films and the short-film programme Glimpses of Europe – celebrate the vitality and distinctive character of contemporary European cinema across different forms, qualities echoed throughout the festival’s other strands. Retrospectives devoted to Márta Mészáros and Hans Alfredson invite us to return to the past so that we might see the present more clearly.
As Scanorama approaches its quarter-century, the opening and closing films frame its cinematic landscape, inviting us to trace connections, affinities and contrasts – both in our encounters with the films and with one another.