“Hey, I escaped the ropes of time once more.” Between shorter beginning and end chapters, the hourlong middle is a diary of a week spent with family in Lithuania, in a hundred numbered chapters. Handheld scenes, sometimes nicely composed and sometimes quick and jittery, with in-camera editing. See: Sicinski
Jonas and mother:
Episode 61: the duck was captured but not harmed:
Observational slow-cinema doc, but that’s fine since half the subjects are Lithuanian water birds. Tourists chatter about the birds over the ever-present low chuckle of cormorant conversation. Mostly the people are being negative, whining how the birds compete with the locals for fish, then shit acid that kills the ancient pine trees – big deal. While there was handheld swaying in Fausto, this one feels like it was shot with hidden/security cameras, the crew returning a year later to collect and edit the footage. I could’ve done without the last 5 minutes of some dude interrupting nesting season with fireworks.
Cuties… if they want to kill all the trees and fishes, that’s their business:
Onscreen text, no narrator, the music all howling wind and doom tones. I thought this might be the coolest feature at the Ann Arbor fest – and so far I’m right – but it wasn’t part of their online program so I had to find it separately.
Uranium factoids, then settles into a kinda observational doc about a gigantic nuclear plant being dismantled in Lithuania, but keeps distracting itself with colors and artworks and models and the snake from the movie poster. Where’d they get the underwater mine photography, wow. The archive footage is all credited at the end, but I can’t tell if that was archival – the director was also production designer and swimmer in one awesome wide shot, and the new footage is seamlessly blended with the borrowed stuff.
