The Role of a Lifetime

A musician on his way to meet a fellow fiddler, encounters two girls and is taken aback by their talks about afterlife. The musicians walk towards a village observing events, unable to discern phantasy from reality. Later, both men attend a funeral, where archaic rituals intertwine with the practice of marrying a dead girl to an ‘afterlife groom’.

The astronaut Chris Kelvin receives a visit from a woman who is a double of his dead wife. This story, told in Stanislaw Lem’s eponymous novel, was once adapted into the film Solaris by the legendary Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. According to Deimantas Narkevičius, Tarkovsky was not as critical of the increasing impact of electronic media on relationships and on the complex nature of human memory as Lem, the original author of the story. In this video, the actor Donatas Banionis reappears in his role as Kelvin, forty years after Tarkovsky’s film was shot. Revisiting Solaris is based on the last chapter of Lem's book, which had been left out of Tarkovsky’s adaptation. In order to visualize the landscape of Solaris and expose complex specters of the past, Narkevičius combines the new footage and a series of photos from 1905 taken by the Lithuanian painter and composer Mykolojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.

The film is inspired by the architecture of the building of the CAC, Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius.

"The film Energy in Lithuania is a documentary study of an industrial installation (an electric power plant), which includes conversations with people who have worked there. Although the power plant is functioning, it has now become like a museum of industrial thought. Still, the livelihood of thousands of people depend on it. It will not be easy to reform industrial society. The biggest challenge is to find a credible intellectual replacement for positivist industrial romanticism." - Deimantas Narkevičius

Film reel and its material qualities are inseparable from an image it carries. Polarity between the physical marks on celluloid and the photographic image that it supports was an inspiration to create a stereoscopic sculptural illusion, titled Stains and Scratches.

A man reflects on the loss his father.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Communism has been symbolically documented by many tv reportages of removals of monumental public sculptures, but the citizens of Vilnius in Lithuania did the unexpected!

With the help of film documents, Deimantas Narkevičius reconstructs the creation and inauguration of the Karl Marx Monument, which was designed by the sculptor Lev Kerbel and erected in 1971 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today Chemnitz). All photographs used were originally produced in the GDR for information and propaganda purposes.

A cinematic assembly of private photographs, which portrays the life story of a family. The pictures depict a common life in the Socialist era and that experience, which seem to have been totally lost.

Into the Unknown is based on found footage of former DDR-documentary films, which spotlight contexts of the daily life of East Berliners. The footage generates a clash between what is seen and heard, mimicking the chasm between propaganda and reality—and the deceiving power of images.

”One Friday morning I got the urge to go and see the center of Europe.”