Karolis Kaupini's Nova Lituania is exclusively showing November 9 - December 8, 2020 on MUBI in the Debuts series.
As I’m writing this there is one day left before the American presidential elections. In recent weeks, it has seemed that the country has been approaching a civil war. Two weeks ago, a teacher was decapitated by an Islamic fundamentalist in Paris. Three more people were stabbed in a church a week later. In the French city of Vienne an ultranationalist crowd of Turks searched for Armenians and there was a bloody rampage in a Jewish community center in Vienna. There is a renewed war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, an ongoing one between Russian and Ukraine. People are being abducted and beaten almost to death by special forces on the streets of Minsk, while the ruler they are protesting is launching a Russian built-and-funded nuclear power plant on the border of my own country, 40 km from the city where I’ve spent my life. All this added to the exponential growth of coronavirus cases all over the western hemisphere, with all the conspiracy theories that growth inspires. All this is in front of your eyes in a period of a few weeks with plenty of such weeks in recent years. There are so many reasons to want to walk the streets ringing the bell of the Apocalypse. Then the wave subsides and a feeling of doubt takes over. Am I too paranoid or is everyone seeing and thinking the same but they are too afraid to admit it? Is this something new or has it always been like this, except that I did not live back then?
In the late 1930s a Lithuanian geographer Kazys Pakštas spent weeks knocking on doors of various governmental offices trying to persuade them about an unavoidable end of the world as they knew it. One of his proposals to avoid this end was establishing a new piece of land that would serve as a “reserve” in case of total annihilation of the country. The only person who took this seriously was the Prime Minister with a weak heart. It’s our knowledge of what happened in the years to come which makes that historical period terrifyingly present. Therefore, while digging into the daily routine of those two figures, turning them into characters, filling out what is unknown to history by fiction, I wanted to make a period piece that would seem historical and contemporary at the same time. To escape the linear understanding of history because so often the past helps me to understand the present better than anything in the present.
Even if it doesn’t, the mere fact of repetition brings some kind of consolation for a mind troubled by “what awaits.”