Before They Meet

Award-winning Lithuanian documentary filmmaker Vytautas Puidokas’s new film tells the story of a rehabilitation centre on an abandoned farm. It’s a refuge for troubled recovering addicts and former prisoners hoping for one last chance at a normal life. It is run by Žanas, a former addict who has turned his life around through nature and religion. One day, a 14-year-old boy named Matas joins the farm, seeking solace from his own childhood trauma. Together they begin to confront his past.

A Lithuanian doctor, priest and a war refugee Alexander Ferdinand Bendoraitis (1919-1998) resettles to the Amazonian jungle in the 1960’s and becomes a local hero: he establishes a boat- clinic network, the first jungle radio, starts the pacification of local indigenous tribes and builds the most modern hospital in Amazonia. However, as he gets involved in a brutal crime, countless fake narratives that he had created around himself begin to resurface.