In a Memory of a Film Gone By

When Marija learns that her unstable boyfriend has disappeared, she takes to the streets in an attempt to find him.

Miglė, who married when she was very young, has for 26 years been divorced from her ex-husband who one day calls her and asks for a favour. He has found that it would be a good time to get married again after the death of his mother. But there is a small problem: their divorce is valid only in the eyes of the law, because a Catholic marriage cannot be divorced. It can, however, be annulled. All that needs to be done is to complete an application and give the “Catholic court” a good reason. But she does not know in what kind of absurd situations she is about to find herself in.

Ever wondered where the clothes at your local second-hand shop came from? A tangled net of murky charity clothes business is spreading out across the entire UK. From London to Lithuania, the journey of the donated garments is accompanied by a hidden life of Lithuanian emigrants in the business. In this documentary comedy with a touch of a detective drama, we will follow lives of four vivid characters, who have cultural clashes, tragicomic incidents yet manage to retain passion and irony in the cruel and inhumane environment.

In 1942, in Vilna, the Nazi annihilate 55,000 Jews and squeeze the 15,000 survivors in a seven blocks ghetto. The twenty-two year old sadistic commander Kittel is assigned to administrate the ghetto in the capital of Lithuania, becoming the master of life or death. When he finds the gorgeous Hayyah sneaking with one kilo of beam stolen from the German army, he sentences her to death; but when he is informed that she was a former successful singer, he decides to activate the old theater and promote shows in the ghetto. The Jew Chief of Police Gens uses the theater and a sewing factory to save as much lives as he can; in his ambiguous position, he kills Jews to save lives of others.

An opera singer, who is a substitute for the primo uomo, has to spend the time of a performance routinely behind the scenes. He has yet no knowing that it will be his turn on that particular day to appear on the stage and replace an Italian singer who had fallen ill.

This is a film about a time that we will never be able to return into. In the 1990s, cult cafe Suokalbis in Vilnius was already riding into the sunset of its existence, though it was still a gathering place for various artists of all ages, visitors and students of all kinds.

Most of the Christmas trees sold in Europe originate from a small mountainous region of Georgia. Together with the families running Christmas tree businesses we follow the journey of the ultimate winter symbol crossing countries and cultures, from Georgian fir forests, through Christmas tree farms in Denmark, shopping rush and festive fireworks. As the holidays are over and the cities quiet down, here and there lie the abandoned Christmas trees.