By Tamar Noort. Helen Mirren shot a movie here, as did Jeremy Irons and Daniel Craig. But they didn’t come to work with local crews. It's foreign companies, mostly from the UK and the US, but also from other European countries, that come to Lithuania to produce their movies and series. The landscape looks familiarly like Northern Europe, the capital Vilnius has a faultless city centre complete with gorgeous buildings that can transport any scene a hundred years back in time – all this without lifting one finger. And so production companies can shoot films in Lithuania for a fraction of the money it might cost them somewhere else. Ideal conditions, then – which these days more and more even the local film industry starts to acknowledge.

Two or three feature films a year

Compared with the other Baltic states Lithuania has the biggest market share of domestic films: Lithuanian films account for 6.65 per cent of tickets bought in their local theatres, Estonia’s number is at 5.12 per cent, and Latvia comes in last with only 2.52 per cent. But the numbers give a wrong impression – Lithuania has fewer cinemas than Estonia but more than twice as many inhabitants; and while Estonia subsidises its domestic film production with an average of four million Euros annually, Lithuania only invested half that sum. Two or three feature films are produced every year. It wasn’t always like this. In the early 1950s an annual average of 40 films were released. Nowadays Lithuania has about 90 cinemas – 50 years ago there was five times that number. Cinema might have been an instrument of Soviet propaganda, but it was booming nonetheless. Of course there was an official Soviet aesthetics. But especially in the 1960s an original Lithuanian film culture evolved, striving for a national identity.

Cinema had to reinvent itself

After the collapse of the Soviet empire Lithuania became independent – which meant a collapse for the complete cinematic infrastructure hitherto existing. Entirely new forms of financing and distribution had to be found. Private production companies took the place of the state’s monopoly. In the middle of the 80s, during Perestroika, when calls were made for democratisation, director Sharunas Bartas had already founded the Studio Kinema – Lithuania’s first independent production studio. Films of his, like FEW OF US, KORIDORIUS and THREE DAYS, grapple artistically with a post-Soviet Lithuania searching for its own identity.

Lithuanian cinema had to completely reinvent itself. Parallel to forging a new infrastructure for the film industry, the country was searching for ways to express the nation’s spirit. This is an ongoing process. And a new generation of filmmakers are already poised to take over this task: new film and media schools have sprung up all over the country, the cinema landscape is broadening, and female directors like Oksana Buraj or Inesa Kurklietyte are coining a young Lithuanian cinema.

Links

• GRADUALLY CONTINUITY (LT 2008. Rimas Sakalauskas)