BBFF Dispatch #1: Three Highlights from Estonia, Latvia, & Lithuania
The following dispatch features reviews of Podnieks on Podnieks. A Witness to History; Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania; & Lioness.
The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs from Friday, 2/28 through Sunday, 3/2 at the Emerson Paramount Center, and through 3/17 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!
The following dispatch features reviews of Podnieks on Podnieks. A Witness to History; Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania; & Lioness.
Podnieks on Podnieks. A Witness to History is the most important film playing at this year’s Boston Baltic Film Festival for the simple fact that it brings Juris Podnieks, one of the most important Baltic documentarians, and even filmmakers at large, to a North American audience for one of the first times in a cinematic focused biography. Anytime Podnieks is brought to the big screen is a win for cinema.
The Latvian Podnieks is most known for Is It Easy to Be Young?, a discursive documentary of the dissident and rebellious lives of 10 Latvian youths near the beginning of the collapse of the USSR. It was the first Latvian entry ever shown at the Cannes Film Festival and was hailed as “the first bird of perestroika” by Mikhail Gorbachev himself. The BBFF is also showing Is It Easy to Be Young? along with the two post-humous sequels in its online programming. His other key titles include a non-conformist portrait of Latvian riflemen, Constellation of Riflemen (1982), and Soviets or Hello, Do You Hear Us? (1980)...
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania has one of the longest titles of the festival– fitting, because it’s just as unforgettable of a film as it is a title. Tomas Vengris’s one-location anthology never meanders outside of its Airbnb in the Lithuanian capital as it follows a series of frustrated lovers. I’ve seen it a handful of times after catching its world premiere at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and each time I become more fond of the film, its structure, its thoughtfully composed images, and its complicated lovers.
The vignettes supply a superb mix of comedy and heartbreak, sexiness and disturbance, intrigue and mundanity—a mix honoring the messiness of love. The guests are about as diverse as their problems: a bachelorette party, an Israeli couple investigating pre-Shoah family history, a bisexual male stripper who pretends to live in the unit to impress another man, and more...
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
Paramedics fulfill a liminal responsibility like few other jobs. They share space with the living, the dead, and those transitioning from the first to the second. Cinematic paramedics have always leaned into this (Bringing Out the Dead being one of the most obvious examples), and Katariina Unt’s Helena in Lioness carves her position into this legacy of cinematic paramedics with an intense seriousness and efficacious regret. She exudes so much guilt with her shrugged shoulders and quiet physicality that the viewer will even feel responsible for her sins by the end.
Her regret comes not from her job as a paramedic, but from her role as a mother. Her 15-year-old daughter Stefi (Teele Piibemann) falls in with the wrong crowd and descends on a path of self-destruction involving drugs, blackmail pornography, and even worse, and Helena’s blameful eyes can only see how her mothering drove her child away. She descends into the Estonian underworld to harrow her daughter from the shadowy corridors of the city before it’s too late.