The Way We Are Living: A Conversation with Andrius Blaževičius on How to Divorce During the War

After Latvia became the first Baltic country to win an Academy Award with Flow in 2025, Conan O’Brien joked, “Ball’s in your court, Estonia!” The innocent omission of Lithuania, the region’s most populous country and thus theoretically most likely to actually produce an Oscar-worthy film, left Lithuanians on the outside. But it is Lithuania that now has an earnest chance to follow up Flow‘s at the Academy Awards with Andrius Blazevicius’ third film How to Divorce During the War. The film is the country’s official submission — and given its success in winning a major award at Sundance, and thus officially becoming a buzzy title with pressing themes, it’s the kind of film that has a legitimate chance in the international category. 

Putting the dull pedantry of any Oscar conversation aside, How to Divorce During the War is worthy of broader cinephilic discourse. While they wait in the car for their daughter’s violin practice to finish, Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) tells her husband Vytas (Marius Repšys) that she wants a divorce. The next day Russia invades Ukraine and the repercussions extend through Lithuanian society. Businesses are pressured to cease operations in Russia, protests start, and we watch a refugee crisis unfold in real-time. The pending divorce isn’t a The Banshees of Inisherin scenario; we just happen to pick up in media res when the love has simmered to vapors. There is another person, another woman (Indrė Patkauskaitė), but the marriage seems dead regardless of an external paramour. 

Andrius Blazevicius’ debut feature, The Saint (2016), took place in 2008 in a provincial town in the countryside, also starred Marius Repšys, and touched on similar mid-life anxieties as his latest film: a man looks for a new job, for a love affair, and for God, but only finds the last. The director followed this up several years later with Runner (2021), in which a young woman named Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) races across the city in search of her unstable boyfriend (again played by Marius Repšys). The same couple returns in How to Divorce During the War, and their chemistry as co-leads must be incredible as they convert it on screen into anti-chemistry. The two don’t hate each other so much as they have grown numb to — and fallen out of — love.

Blazevicius’ direction balances an emotional distance (an “observational” approach, he calls it) and refrains from the happy ending that would have been all-too easy. The war context, meanwhile, will be familiar to anyone fluent in the latest in Eastern European cinema (A Russian Winter), but that is also because this is the world they live in. How to Divorce During the War, though, neither over-contextualizes the war nor reduces life to it. After all, Lithuania is technically still at peace — even though every day that feels increasingly fragile to many Baltic citizens. 

As the film releases into U.S. theaters, I talked with Blazevicius over Zoom about an in-world film shown on the TV in How to Divorce During the War, queerness in Lithuanian cinema, the “cold” visuals of a Baltic winter, the physical vs. metaphorical angles of a scene of domestic abuse, a frustrating interaction with a committee from the Lithuanian Film Centre, and much more.

The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Joshua Polanski: Thank you for being here, Andrius. I wanted to start with an easy question, and it’s about the film that’s featured in the background on the TV. Aesthetically, it reminded me a lot of Southern Chronicles. Was that intentional? Can you tell us more about that film?

Andrius Blaževičius: No, not at all. The first idea was to use something I did myself in the past, maybe in film school, but the problem is that Marius [Repšys] is in every film of mine. 

So then I asked Laurynas Bareiša (Drowning Dry), the director, whom I know really, really well. It was basically his first short film from when he was still studying cinematography. I really loved it. I remember when I saw it for the first time, I thought that he would be a future star of European Art House cinema, and I was right. And the short film wasn’t big in any way. It didn’t travel a lot. And so, I thought it would fit because I wanted it to be in this ‘90s style.

At the time when I was writing, Southern Chronicles still hadn’t been released. So when I was writing, there was still this idea here in Lithuania that we really miss films that talk about the ’90s, which was a really crucial time in our country’s history because it was a transitional time from socialism to capitalism. 

I really wanted a trashy aesthetic. Plus, it looks really like an arthouse film, and I really loved that short film. This was the idea basically: something without Marius Repšys and something more Eastern European in style.

JP: You do work with the same cinematographer as Southern Chronicles though, Narvydas Naujalis.

AB: I worked with Narvydas on this and Runner. He also shot a few shorts of Laurynas Bareiša’s and his first feature, Pilgrims.

JP: Is the film’s title the same in Lithuanian?

AB: It’s a bit different. It’s without the word “how.” It probably would sound like Divorce During the War, for a literal translation. I really love the English one, but somehow, to translate it into Lithuanian, it wouldn’t sound the same. It wouldn’t have this feeling of this wordplay.

JP: What I like about the title is it inserts Lithuania into the war, which, of course, on some level it is not Lithuania’s war. Hopefully, it will never be Lithuania’s war. [Blazevicius crosses his fingers.] But, in a way, it says this war is our problem. Was that always the title?

AB: It’s the first time ever when I didn’t change the working title. Usually, I have a totally different title in the beginning and only when the film is edited do I come up with the final title. In this case, it was the same title all along.

This war is a big problem for us and for our country because of our history; we are really close to the war zone, and we are very close to Ukrainians. We have been supporting them all along, actually from probably 2008 even. It was even earlier, actually, with the Orange Revolution. But when this war started, as it is shown in the film, it was a huge shock really.

It’s really hard to explain because, I think, there are just maybe three countries in Europe that are having this reaction to the war: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. 

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