Shattered Skies

The drama concerns one family, and a deep social-psychological process set in this period of new Soviet new town planning, that portrays its industrial ideology encroaching upon the family in their Lithuanian village. After a long absence Steponas Kreivenas, a travelling building contracter, returns to his parent’s home. His return only speeds up the disintegration of the patriarchal family. Steponas, his brothers and a sister do not want to accept their father’s kind of life. Steponas, an example of a new culture of mobility, and does not understand his parents, their focus on family, and their farm, as a narrow interest. Equally alien for Steponas is the mercantile passion for property accumulation that possesses his brother Vacis, living in the town. In this story is presented two woman characters linked through Steponas’s story. Their roles as sister and wife, represent for women no possibility to decide alone on a direction in life. His wife, Polina accompanies him silently, in spite of the hardships she has to sustain. Sister Sarune is dreaming of the big city life. She must decide between the security of a middle class bourgeois life in a town as a pattern she inherited through her family, and the overwhelming sense of uncertainty that comes by challenging this. Her inability to decide leaves her full of doubts and frustrations throughout the film, without any resolution or step towards commitment. —haussite.net