PӦFF (Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival ) Interview: Director Deimantas Narkevičius on Twittering Soul

Very rarely does a screening of a film become an essential cinephile event. But for both its challenging originality and availability, every screening of Twittering Soul, the first-ever Lithuanian fiction film to make use of stereoscopy, should be considered a de facto event for local cinephiles. Set in the nineteenth century, two traveling musicians discern what life after death might look like, a rich landowner obsesses over stereoscopic images, and well-intended witches are part of everyday life in this mundane-fantasy shot in the all-but already fantastical South Lithuanian countryside.

Keeping true to his artistic integrity, director and reputable multi-modal artist Deimantas Narkevičius has no intentions of ever releasing the film in standard 2-D. And with the lack of 3-D programming, especially at the single screen and arthouse theaters most likely to show a Lithuanian non-genre conforming film in the first place, it seems unlikely to ever receive a wide release in the United States and any hopes for physical distribution just seems fantastical. (Distributors and exhibitors, prove me wrong.) To watch 3-D films as intended, one needs access to either high-quality projectors or virtual reality equipment—both of which are serious economic investments with limited opportunities for capitalization in the first place (How often does a Resident Evil: Retribution come out?). So, for scarcity reasons alone, any and every screening of Twittering Soul should be considered a cinephile event of the same scale as (any) 70mm repertoire programming or a new Park Chan-wook release. In truth, most interested viewers, regretfully, will never even have the opportunity to catch Narkevičius’s great and ineffable film.

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