Henrikas Šablevičius

Four different stories about young kids' destinies in different time periods in Lithuania.

A film about circus veterans. The main characters of the film are Barnabas, a power juggler, Jonas Ramanauskas, a folk artist of the LSSR, and Jadvyga Stankutė-Ramanauskienė, an acrobat. Both are long retired, but even in their cosy homes, their memories of the circus do not leave them, so the film recalls the interesting and sad history of Lithuanian circus.

Harlequin wanders through the night streets of old Vilnius, searching for friendship and human warmth.

A surrealist etude that doesn’t have a clear narrative, and is courageous in its form, unusual in the context of Lithuanian cinema at the time.

Based on the novel of the same name by Raimondas Kašauskas, about a strange man who is restless, who wants to live differently from everyone else, to play life.

About the folklore ensemble of elderly village singers.

The film’s protagonist, P. Pūras, has dedicated his life to working diligently at the Žiežmariai clinic. He is not a doctor, yet the institution’s daily operations would be unimaginable without him—he is a jack-of-all-trades: driver, electrician, plumber. He performs every task willingly and joyfully, never engaging in conflict with others or himself, never questioning whether helping someone will bring him any benefit. He simply works, and that brings him satisfaction. Šablevičius portrays a man who maintains his optimism and inner clarity in any situation.

When Henrikas Šablevičius started filming Lithuanian “oddballs” – a professor, a fortune teller, racers, and many others who fell short of the concept of the “model citizen” – he invented a bizarre new genre of documentary biopic. Characteristic of these portraits is a sense of mocking irony directed not at their subjects (on the contrary, the filmmaker’s affection for them is palpable) but at the “Soviet hero” genre. The subject of this film is Apolinaras, a kindhearted policeman who even outwardly looks very unlike the ideological “guardian of morals.”.