Holy Destructors

A Baltic film festival would be incomplete without a documentary in the poetic tradition of the Baltic countries. Originating through a resistance to the Soviet house style, the Baltic poetic documentary emerged in the 1960s and articulated a new, more formalist documentary that avoided talking head interviews (or talking altogether) and the explicitly political in favour of meditative images and mundane subjects. Holy Destructors, a Lithuanian-Latvian co-production with additional support from France, carries the tradition to new and much smaller places.

The feature-length documentary studies a topic so niche it’s almost certainly the first film to dedicate itself to it: the fungi and other microbial life associated with a variety of Christian iconographic paintings of Easter processions, of both the modern and non-modern sort, and the bio-archaeologists and restorers working with them. The small critters (if that’s even the right term) twinkle and twiddle as they “destroy” the remnants of holy people and their icons.

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