Ieva Veiverytė

Those of us who fly in airplanes probably don’t think about those who fly through Riga Airport on their own wings. But on any given day, up to 30,000 birds might visit the airport. And it would only take one… Airport wildlife control employee Mareks would like to go to church and light a candle for luck before he goes to work every day. In fact, all of us need that luck – it’s just that we’re not aware of it. Maybe that’s a good thing. Understanding wildlife that might turn up at the airport and making sure that the paths of birds, animals and airplanes don’t cross is a very real job.

Marius is a highly successful lawyer based in Vilnius. He becomes obsessed with Ali, a handsome Syrian refugee he first encounters in an online chatroom run out of Belgrade. Marius is rich and enjoys a vibrant social and cultural life. Nevertheless, he feels that something is missing from it. The journey from Lithuania to Serbia is a relatively short one, but can the two navigate their way through the gulf that separates their very different lives? And how do they deal with the precarious obstacles of the physical borders that stand between them? Written and directed by Romas Zabarauskas, The Lawyer questions assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant and the possibilities offered by life in contemporary Europe.

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.

Elena meets up with her mother Daiva, who is living abroad and has returned to Lithuania to sell the family’s uninhabited apartment. While Daiva rushes to get the apartment in order before the buyers arrive, Elena has other plans – to get her long-lost mother back.

The story of a 50-something who is living with her dominant mother trying to start an independent life.

The intimacy of passing by. Heading home, to work, to see a friend, to buy dinner, or perhaps to the cinema. As the seasons change, we encounter fellow passengers along the way. They commute, sit, wait, get bored, maybe sometimes stare at their small screens more than through the windows – but they always reach their destination. Alongside them are kiosk vendors, vegetable and flower sellers, janitors, and drivers, whose daily routines complement the journeys of the travellers. Public transport stops become intimate crossroads, offering us an unexpected, moving visual symphony of Riga neighbourhoods.

An insecure millennial woman pursues her dream whilst learning how to adult. While being preoccupied with life tasks at hand she can barely handle and also severe depression, main character of this film Marta (30) keeps dreaming about making films, drawn to the healing power of storytelling, but not having the courage to act these dreams out; sometimes she is too scared to even pick up the phone. Marta’s life seems to sway both in comic and tragic directions: it’s sometimes a mix of ultimate freedom, sex, drugs, friendship, laughter, alcohol, lots of alcohol, music, honesty and love, and sometimes the reality Marta avoids to face becomes so brutal she can’t take it anymore. Through the course of the film Marta learns there is an unavoidable question that at some point becomes inevitable for almost every filmmaker: if you really want to direct films, can you first direct yourself out of depression?

The friendship of a doctor Vitolis Laumakys and an engineer Adolfas Morėnas started in 1962, while fixing a broken motorcycle. That very same year they set up an amateur film studio by the name “The Amateur”. Gradually it became one of the most successful amateur film studios in Lithuania, and their second home. In five decades they created almost a hundred of short films. Although Vitolis and Adolfas are still actively working – digitalizing their film archives, “The Amateur” is facing some unpleasent changes.