Before Flying Back to the Earth

Arunas Matelis’ film is a gracefully expressive journey into the lives of children living with leukemia at a pediatric hospital in Vilnius, Lithuania. The children enter into an alien world, bereft of color and warmth, but populated with kind strangers. Their new toys are invented out of stainless steel, and new friendships are formed in the crucible of the cancer ward. Inured to the routine of daily medication and meals that alternate between porridge and cabbage soup, the children dream of life beyond the clinic’s thick cement walls while their parents bear the burden of uncertainty about their children’s fate. The filmmaker spent eight months at this very hospital while his own daughter battled leukemia. After her successful recovery he returned to the ward, with his camera in tow, to make a record of the young patients and their families who had become his friends. Arunas returns to the ward to create a film full of life and magic moments in the face of non-existence. The children’s intimate relationship with Matelis is evident in their ease with his camera. He eloquently juxtaposes their accounts with still black and white photos capturing simple moments. As the seasons outside change from pristine winter snow to verdant summer, daily life in the hospital remains the same. Yet it is not despair, but rather hope and innocence that Matelis so eloquently captures. While this is a film about cancer, cancer is not the thing you remember. Ultimately, this is a story about the force of life which is more powerful than the specter of death. A poetic, unsentimental film about the resilience of the human spirit. —IMDb