Best Lithuanian movies

Four friends become stranded in Eastern Europe and have to become hit men, prostitutes, corrupt cops, smugglers and more to make it home.

Lithuanian provincial town is facing the economic crisis in 2008. Vytas gets fired from the factory. Pushed by his wife, he immediately starts looking for a new job, but not really successfully. After having his haircut done, Vytas starts looking for a new love affair with a hairdresser Marija, but not really successfully, either. Finally, Vytas gets involved into a third search - he starts looking for a guy who posted video on youtube, claiming he saw Jesus Christ in their town. This is the only time he succeeds.

Six young college hopefuls vacationing and partying in Lithuania get more than they bargained for when they unwittingly get caught up in a maniacal tattoo artist's fiendish side business.

Seventeen-year-old Sangaile is fascinated by stunt planes. She meets a girl her age at the summer aeronautical show, nearby her parents' lakeside villa. Sangaile allows Auste to discover her most intimate secret and in the process finds in her teenage love, the only person that truly encourages her to fly.

Dancer Elena and sign language interpreter Dovydas meet and form a beautiful bond. As they dive into a new relationship, they must navigate how to build their own kind of intimacy.

On the verge of retirement, Commissioner Gintas must undertake the investigation of a series of heinous murders, a dangerous task that could expose the many dirty secrets of several prominent members of the social elite of a small Lithuanian town.

The incredible story of the 1992 Lithuanian basketball team, whose athletes struggled under Soviet rule, became symbols of Lithuania's independence movement, and – with help from the Grateful Dead – triumphed at the Barcelona Olympics.

The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 - 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.

A group of classmates celebrate their graduation in an isolated place about which a sinister story is told.

What would you get if you mix a gangster film and a soap opera? "Zero 2" is a crazy twister of criminal romance and sexy violence that just might laugh you to death.

It follows Rimants who is more interested in playing rugby, listening to music and dealing on the black market than studying for school, but when he falls in love with Monika, his faith in love and the future is tested.

In Miglė Križinauskaitė-Bernotienė's "The Bearers of Memories", what the filmmaker remembers of her late grandmother is being slowly eroded by time, the starting point to a contemplative search of rural landscapes, an old photograph, an abandoned dwelling, and the faces of others, all strikingly captured on 16mm and enhanced by an intricate acoustic score.

A psychology postgraduate student escorts two patients and their nurse to a seaside psychiatric clinic. Along their journey, they break through each other's barriers, delve into the sources of their various traumas, and discover the lasting imprints left on their fragile souls.

They're called water carriers, domestics, 'gregarios', 'Sancho Panzas' of professional cycling. Always at the back of the group, with no right for a personal victory. These wonderful losers are the true warriors of professional cycling.

It is a story about a woman with a desperate desire to escape the reality and to fly away. But she has only eight minutes, that’s the longest sunbed session she could afford. And at the very moment when the artificial sun lamp turns off, she will have to go back to the reality. First to the cheap tanning salon, then to the everyday life with sleet, traffic jams and stress – ultimately back to the daily routine. The tiny vacation is over. But only until the next time, until the next moment of weakness.

Rokas and Inga, a couple of young Lithuanians, volunteer to drive a cargo van of humanitarian aid to Ukraine. They cross the vast snowy lands of the Donbass region, drifting into the lives of those affected by the war.

In the Cold War years of the 1970s, an American patrol boat meets a Soviet ship off the east coast of the United States for talks about fishing rights in the Atlantic. In the midst of this, while Russian commanders are aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel where the talks are being held, a Lithuanian sailor jumps across the ten feet of icy water separating the boats. Crash-landing on the deck of the American ship, he desperately begs for asylum. Though they try, the Americans ultimately fail to provide protection and the Soviets are allowed to capture him and brutally return him to their vessel. Thus begins a stranger-than-fiction story of imprisonment, discovery, fame, and freedom. Through rare archival footage and a dramatic first-person re-enactment of that fateful day by Simas Kudirka, the would-be defector himself, this tale of one of the biggest Cold War muddles takes us on a journey of uncanny twists of fate, and the emotional sacrifices of becoming a universal symbol of freedom.

Paramedic Vincentas is a passionate gambler, who is forced to make radical decisions to return the debts. An idea strikes Vincentas to create an illegal game related to his profession. Love, life and death will be at stake.

During the interwar period, a Lithuanian geography professor tries to convince the government to establish a backup state overseas, in order to save their country from ruin. However, the idea is mostly mocked and opposed. Still, there is hope in the secret support from the elderly prime minister, who has become disillusioned with politics.

A romance blooms between a noblewoman and a common man amid a peasant revolt against the brutal Russian army

Dreaming of an escape from the bleakness of their hometown, two teens form a unique bond at a local modeling school, where the promise of a better life pushes girls to violate their bodies in increasingly extreme ways.

ZERO is an 0 sucking in a young deserter, a casino victim and three heroin brothers. That is a destiny, a mixture of objectives and desires of heroes. That is a lifestyle balancing on the edge - bullets, numbers and needles.

A gambling villager Julius suddenly wins 3 million euros in a lottery and does not know what to do with it.

Marius is a highly successful lawyer based in Vilnius. He becomes obsessed with Ali, a handsome Syrian refugee he first encounters in an online chatroom run out of Belgrade. Marius is rich and enjoys a vibrant social and cultural life. Nevertheless, he feels that something is missing from it. The journey from Lithuania to Serbia is a relatively short one, but can the two navigate their way through the gulf that separates their very different lives? And how do they deal with the precarious obstacles of the physical borders that stand between them? Written and directed by Romas Zabarauskas, The Lawyer questions assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant and the possibilities offered by life in contemporary Europe.

Fake life bursts like a bubble when Donatas receives a phone call from his rich and powerful father.

Early years of Lithuanian independence from the soviets. Rebellious, weak hearted, but strong willed boy Saulius arrives at a youth sanatorium where he meets some charismatic friends, fights for the love of his life and gets some valuable life lessons from his coach.

An outrageous crime - action - comedy examining corruption and greed in Lithuanian politics.

A documentary about Lithuania's first female president and her 10 years in office.

Celebration in a country of basketball. Lithuania, probably the only country in the world where basketball is routinely described as a religion, hosts the most important basketball event of the year - the European basketball championship or EuroBasket 2011. The biggest nation's pride, Lithuania's national basketball team has a long winning tradition. The entire Lithuania is waiting only for the gold. However the team's star player Linas Kleiza has suffered a serious injury and will not be playing for the championship.

More than a hundred members of the Lithuanian film community have joined together in a voluntary film project "Letter to Ukraine", which aims to record what is happening in our country at this difficult time. The film focuses on a person close to the war: a passer-by, a protester, a volunteer, a medic, an artist.

Documentary about a hospital ward for children with leukemia in Lithuania.

With striking images and meticulous sound work, Burial reminds us of the paradoxical relationship between scientific development and the destruction of nature. Questioning the effects of human activity on the planet we inhabit and which we have put at risk, the film focuses on the unsolved issues of nuclear plants and nuclear activity.

Black comedy "What's Your Emergency?" is a mockumentary style story about the police headquarters. Redundancy intimidate officials are working diligently as ever, but the call-outs this month will not give them a break. Moreover, one of the officials gets caught in the workplace-using stolen and evidence room kept drugs. Explosions, shootings, helicopters, love, erotic, music stars, movie stars and much more.

A girl wants to be the smartest person in the world. When all the things she's learned can no longer fit in just one head, her mother buys her a backup one.

The Lithuanian scientist Ausra Revutaite has spent 30 years in the Tian Shan mountain range in Central Asia, straddling the borders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. Some 3,500 meters above sea level with only her faithful dog and gray cat for company, she studies climate change on the Tuyuksu Glacier at an old Soviet-era research station. She loves the solitude and silence that her painstaking work brings her. Magnificent shots of her surroundings and everyday work are interspersed with archive footage of the people who preceded her by a century. Not much seems to have changed.

The film connects the stories of three generations of women as their lives and misunderstandings revolve around relationships with men.

It is highly probable that before their own death, everyone has to organise someone else’s funeral. This is by far not an easy task. In addition to the searing grief, dying also brings a number of tasks that are at once utterly alien and intensely time-critical. The main character of this film, Dovile, who unexpectedly has to bury her father, has to face the bedlam of exactly such a challenge. Overnight, the young girl has to become a skilful organiser of a family event, while also being a specialist on coffins, urns, wreaths and funeral feasts. Dovile’s journey towards organising a perfect funeral is inevitably full of hardship and mishaps, accompanied mainly by black humour and comical situations.

About betrayal and revenge. A loving couple in the woods is suddenly caught by a runaway thief and his two companions. Some of the weird five will have to start a new life, some will stay in the dark woods forever.

Spouses Simas and Giedre feel that their sexual life is similar to the buckwheat diet. But one evening they suddenly find themselves in bed with another woman. Giedre after this adventure remains easily confused, and Simas is completely twisted in the head ... The man puts a cart and speaks his wife to sleep with a pair of swingers. Only the swingers themselves and the party in their luxurious home will not be as everyone expected ...

The four men --Petuchauskas, Rainis, Rexas, and Kanopa-- form a band, hoping to surprise the world with their music. Their journey to the Olympus of Glory is full of surprises, falls, and curiosities, especially after the strange hair manager LEO takes over to lead the group. Their lives are full of passion, loss, and frustration, because everyone falls in love with the same muse -- a traveling girl named Inda. Their music spreads the romance of "flowers and children" and the nostalgia of lost times, because they are the Last Musicians in Bremen.

A feature film "Emigrants" is like a protest against the most painful current process in Lithuania - emigration. "Emigrants" encloses a tragic, but filled with light humour and irony story of one Lithuanian family.

Radio Free Europe, BBC, and Voice of America can only rarely get through the Iron Curtain and Soviet mufflers to Lithuania, a country torn by a war between the local resistance movement and the Soviet regime that is forced onto Lithuanian people by bayonets of the Russian army. Everybody who tries to resist the Soviet rule is either terrorized or executed or exiled to Siberia. He is one of the local high-school students who witness the local armed resistance to the Soviet occupation and ultimately decide to join it by taking a gun into their hands. He collects documents and all possible kinds of evidence that prove daunting crimes of the Kremlin. He soon becomes a legend among his peers. To girls, he is John Wayne the Hollywood Icon. Guys see him as an insurmountable obstacle and an invincible rival in matters of love.

It was the year 1984 when a group of architects decided to organize a one night music band as a New Year's party joke in Kaunas, Lithuania. The joke proved to be so good that rumors about the new exciting rock band spread from lips to lips and soon their intellectual circus grew into the Rock Marches - massive events involving thousands of people - that transformed into the big meetings for Lithuanian Independence later named the Singing Revolution. This is the story about the people who raised their independence with the smiles and songs regardless of the danger of the situation.

Colorful life of 19th century Lithuanian country side, is what Jurgis experiences when he meets a book smuggler.

The boys are back. Comedy team of 4 beloved actors of improvisation theater KITAS KAMPAS are returning to a new film. This time they are going to class reunion.

The singer called Punk is no longer of much interest to anyone. After his brush with fame, it only took a few years of drugs and alcohol to reach rock bottom. After yet another small town concert, Punk ends up spending the night backstage, drunk and alone. When he opens his eyes in the morning, he sees a little girl, who introduces herself as his daughter. Two lost souls set out on a trip together – a trip which will not only change their lives, but will also bring them together to appreciate the joy it brings.

Four Lithuania's founding fathers suddenly come back to life 100 years later after signing Lithuania's declaration of independence. Now it's stored somewhere in Berlin's archives, and they are on a mission to get it back.

The site manager of the palace of culture, sports and entertainment is thwarted by a call from his wife. Meanwhile, the children gather in the palace lobby for a martial arts session, but two boys escape.

Soviet eighties. A little town in the periphery. After his parents' divorce, 11-year-old Rolanas and his dad move in next door to same-aged Emilija. Friendship is born between the kids, however, shyness or fear of opening up makes them communicate through the wall, sitting in their own balconies, or through a socket connecting their flats. Emilija's parents also appear to be on the verge of divorce. The children discover common topics, activities. Unfortunately, a nearly tragic accident prevents Emilija to go to the balcony. This encourages both children to set out for a "real" date.

Following a traumatic experience, Gaile, a speech therapist, is incapable of feeling any emotion. However, while preparing a video presentation for a scientific conference, she sees herself on screen and is surprised to find suppressed sensations returning to her, primarily feelings of aggression. Gaile decides to try an experiment. With the help of a man and his video camera she stages various provoking situations and shows the result to those involved. Throughout the experience she is unable to perceive the value of normal emotions, or even the possibility that someone may have feelings for her

The film portrays Lukša's attempts, in trips to western Europe, to gain support for the armed anti-Soviet resistance (known as the Forest Brothers), whose fortunes in a guerrilla war against Soviet authorities were waning, largely due to widespread infiltration and harsh crackdowns by the NKVD.

Two rednecks rob a wedding train.

The story about one man - an artist and an intellectual - who was imprisoned by two brutal regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. 'The Professor' is a man who lives by his own personal version of the Ten Commandments. After miraculously surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a bit of ironic fate, he writes a memoir of his life, which becomes the target of the Soviet censors. The so-called "freedom" of Communism becomes just as oppressive as the German concentration camp.

Dorothy - a little Kansas girl reads a magical book and is spirited away into the Magical Land by Wicked Witch Gingema. She experiences many adventures trying to go back home to her family.

Everyone in Lithuania knows Vytautas Kernagis – heard him singing, saw him on stage, or hosting TV shows. The public constantly saw Kernagis and thought they knew and understood him. But Kernagis was convinced that the artist must always remain somewhat mysterious. However, still living in the Soviet Union, he was among the first ones to buy a personal video camera in the mid-1980s and has documented his life on a VHS camera for more than ten years.

Soviet Lithuania in 1972. A young theatre actress is trying to make a difference and tell the forbidden story of repression in a play.

The year is 2000. Aleksandra, a young prosecutor, is handling a human trafficking case. She must conduct two interrogation sessions in one day. First, Aleksandra faces Andrius – a high-school friend turned suspect, who provokes and undermines her strategy, not leaving her any breathing space. During the second interrogation, she talks with Viktorija, the victim who has personal reasons to distrust law enforcement.

A moving world of spirits and ghosts, condemned to brush against one another without really meeting since they have all emerged from a single perpetual dream: that of a young man who no longer wants to wake up, immersed as he is in this world of fascinating spectres.

Second part (despite the number 3 in the title) of the Lithuanian black comedy about the local police force. The 7th Police Precinct does what officers seldom do - blow a fortune. Embracing a new unofficial motto, “Buy, Spend, Waste,” they soon learn that money can’t buy happiness, which doesn’t stop them from trying.

“100 Years Together” is a cinematic portrait of Lithuanian centenarians who were the youngest citizens of Restored Independent Lithuania. The stories written on their faces, in their eyes and beneath their wrinkles, the experiences of their long lives, their deep wounds and secrets, reveal how major historical events in Lithuania affected the fate of its people.

He considers himself a genius but the publishers refuse to print his works. He loves women but they don’t always understand him. Constantly without money and out of touch with reality. The elegant fop Daniil Yuvachov names himself Kharms- a name just as effective as his appearance. An habitué of unending literary get-togethers and a lover of scandal. Living in society he is completely separate from it. Kharms throws down a gauntlet to his time, audaciously hurling himself into the vortex of reality, just as vague and arbitrary, with the same contradictions, as represented by his spirit.

The film - an open, sincere, warm and funny story about Arvydas Sabonis life and career. This is particularly characteristic of a T-shirt with the number 11 worn out 2.20 m tall basketball giant Olympic and world champion, portrait.

Human beings are the kings of all animals, at least if you ask us humans. Our vanity is given something to mirror itself in, but does not escape without a scratch or two in this documentary, which observes a taxidermist, a deer farmer and a museum curator at work. Three jobs that have one thing in common: turning animals into aesthetic objects, alive as well as dead. When the work is done properly, it is impossible to tell the difference. Dead pets are mummified. At the zoological museum, the animals' glassy eyes stare back at us from the showcases. Even a plastic alligator has its natural place in the human master plan.

At the beginning of the 1960s, when the French pioneers of cinéma vérité set out to achieve a new realism, and when direct cinema in Québec began to vie for notice, the Baltics wit-nessed the birth of a generation of documentarists who favored a more romantic view of the world around them. This meditative documentary essay – from a Latvian writer and Lithuanian director whose composed touch has long dovetailed with the stylistically diverse works of the Baltic New Wave – pushes adroitly past the limits of the common his-toriographic investigation to create a portrait of less-clearly remembered filmmakers. The result is a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation. Also a cinematic poem about cinema poets.