Earth of the Blind

"After “Antigravitation” I wanted to make another step up, where disappears last prop under your feets. “Flying Over the Blue Field” – movie about loneliness in infinite sky. Man stays with himself, home-made plane and balance on the limit between death and life." - Audrius Stonys.

The film features an incredibly low angel’s flight over the dunes of Nida, Trakai castle, the lakes of Aukstaitija (Highlands), the roofs of the Old Town of Vilnius and the fantastically beautiful church steeples. It’s like a mystical gliding just above the treetops, meadows covered by early morning mist, as well as the narrow streets of Vilnius.

The Lithuanian scientist Ausra Revutaite has spent 30 years in the Tian Shan mountain range in Central Asia, straddling the borders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. Some 3,500 meters above sea level with only her faithful dog and gray cat for company, she studies climate change on the Tuyuksu Glacier at an old Soviet-era research station. She loves the solitude and silence that her painstaking work brings her. Magnificent shots of her surroundings and everyday work are interspersed with archive footage of the people who preceded her by a century. Not much seems to have changed.

A sad child is going to pay a visit to her mother in prison. Her solitude is immense. Sitting in the backseat, she looks on in silence outside the window while the landscape passes in front of her eyes.

Sorrow does not come merely from contemplating death, which forces us to look into Eternity, but also from life, which compels us to confront Time", wrote Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev. Renowned Lithuanian documentarist Audrius Stonys took these words as a motto for his latest film, a meditative visual essay which portrays old people undertaking all kinds of activities, meditation and group laughter therapy. Without a single word of commentary, he creates from sophisticated, aesthetic images a compelling study of human corporeality which, in an ideal union with spiritual equilibrium, can sustain us with the pledge that old age doesn't have to be a painful wait for the last breath.

Two young men leave a neglected but cozy native nook for a strange seaport town Kenigsberg. There they meet two girls the outsiders like themselves. Any attempt to find a normal human contact leads to misunderstanding. Or perhaps they are also lonely and unhappy. The realities, provoking a forced individualism melt in the atmosphere of the town, on which there lies a seal of historical and human cataclysms.

At the beginning of the 1960s, when the French pioneers of cinéma vérité set out to achieve a new realism, and when direct cinema in Québec began to vie for notice, the Baltics wit-nessed the birth of a generation of documentarists who favored a more romantic view of the world around them. This meditative documentary essay – from a Latvian writer and Lithuanian director whose composed touch has long dovetailed with the stylistically diverse works of the Baltic New Wave – pushes adroitly past the limits of the common his-toriographic investigation to create a portrait of less-clearly remembered filmmakers. The result is a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation. Also a cinematic poem about cinema poets.

Ramin, an ex-wrestler who once won seven matches in 55 seconds, lives alone in the east Georgian town of Kvareli. Long ago he fell in love with a girl with whom he was estranged soon after he met her. Now, at 75, still unmarried but full of life, he travels to a remote village to seek her out. This film presents Ramin's journey through the Georgian landscape and through the memories of this man with a old aged body and an unbeatable heart.

While shooting “Flying over blue field” we lived in Birtonas sanatorium hotel. I was watching treatment procedures. People were plunging into bubble, mud and mineral water baths. They were going circles singing, were standing under cold water spouts. All this seemed like a sacred ritual, that frees from scurf of life. They were naked, like just born, without any signs of standing in society. Movie – silent impression about tired people "harbour".

An isolated village in the Lithuanian countryside. Seated in her house, an elderly woman recites an old folk story. Then she climbs up the tall ladder that takes her to the rooftop of the church.

The film is about metamorphosis of wedding traditions. What happened to the old wedding ways and customs that were market by joy, mystery and sadness?

The story of a grave under the roots of a big oak. Three unknown soldiers rest in it- two Russians and a German. After more than 70 years, a group of archaeologists decided to go on a quest to explore this.

Man at the gates of eternity. Water flows form a small pitcher. The Jordan River immerses death and it immerses life. A small oil - cross on the forehead of a new - born, the scent of God, a candle lit to show the road even when the night is at its darkest. A film about the unseen miracle of Baptism and the inexplicable touch of God.

During the Swedish-Lithuanian war 300 years ago, the bell of the Plateliai church was apparently dismantled and then left to sink at the centre of the eponymous lake. Stonys followed a scientific diving expedition organised for the purpose of finding the disappeared bell and thus confirming what seems like a popular legend. Like in Countdown, the filmmaker widens his consideration of collective memory and the bringing into crisis of belief.

Fedia – man living in little yellow house next to Gariūnai marketplace. To him life seems simple, completely transparent and without any hidden truths.

Seven versions of Riga, the city on the Baltic Sea, and its features as seen by outstanding European film directors: Sergei Loznitsa (The Old Jewish Cemetery), Ivars Seleckis (On Ķīpsala), Audrius Stonys (Riga Boats), Jaak Kilmi (Littering Prohibited!), Jon Bang Karlsen (Cats in Riga), Rainer Komers (Daugava Delta), and Bettina Henkel (Theatre Street 6).