Vytautas Žalakevičius: Time Suspended

Vytautas Žalakevičius remains Lithuania’s most prominent director and screenwriter – a filmmaker who, to this day, inspires as much admiration as controversy. In the history of his country’s cinema, he stands as one of its classic figures: a co-founder of the Lithuanian film school, an artist who set the bar for the ambitions cinema strives for when attempting to tell grand stories through the lens of individual experience.

He was an exceptionally colorful and contradictory artist. This contradiction, however, is not merely a personality trait – it is the foundation of his cinema. His work unfolds as a field of tension: between freedom and a world that constantly seeks to restrict it, between values that cannot be reconciled – though freedom always remained paramount for him.

Those embarking on a journey into Lithuanian cinema should see Nobody Wanted to Die. It is one of Žalakevičius’s most important and poignant films—a raw, mesmerizing tale of postwar Lithuania, occupied by the USSR after World War II, where “brother stands against brother” and every choice carries irreversible consequences. One of the most-watched Lithuanian films, it was included by UNESCO in 1995 – on the occasion of the centennial of cinema – on the list of the 100 most important works of world cinema.

The section is curated by Vita Maria Drygas.