Revisiting Solaris
Based on the unfilmed last chapter of Stansiław Lem’s book Solaris, more than forty years after
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the same name, the actor Donatas Banionis reprises his role as Chris Kelvin. To materialise the landscape of Solaris, Narkevičius used a series of photographs from
1905 made by the Lithuanian symbolist painter and composer Mykalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis,
repurposing the same Black (Crimean) Sea that Tarkovsky himself had photographed to represent the mysterious ocean.
Energy Lithuania
A documentary study of an electric power plant that includes conversations with people who have worked there, almost becoming a museum of industrial thoughts.
Disappearance of a Tribe
A cinematic assembly of private photographs which portray the life story of a family, depicting a common life in the Socialist era, which seems to have been totally lost.
The Head
Edited from existing DDR TV footage and photo material from the ‘60s and ‘70s that features the
creation of the largest head (portrait) monument in the world modeled by sculptor Lev Yefimovitch Kerbel and erected in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) in 1971.
Once in the XX Century
This film is based on pre-existing video material. The material which I acquired from the Lithuanian National TV archive documents the action of the taking down the statue of Lenin. In addition, I have bought video footage of the same event from a freelance video reporter. So, there is a two-camera perspective on the event. | The images of the taking down the statue of Lenin in Vilnius are in fact familiar, as the materials were widely broadcast by CNN and some other major media networks. The images of Lenin hanging above the crowd and waving his hand had been repeated thousands of times by CNN during the last decade as a symbol of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and a failure of the idea of communism. In this work, the materials are edited in such a way that it looks as if the crowd were preparing, and then celebrating, the erection of the statue of Lenin.
Ausgetraumt (Dream Over)
Not one Lithuanian pop musician has reached international acclaim. Addressing his fascination with naivety, Narkevičius documents a small group of young Lithuanian boys who have just started a band, interspersing shots of their wintertime surroundings in Vilnius.