Audrius Stonys

"After “Antigravitation” I wanted to make another step up, where disappears last prop under your feets. “Flying Over the Blue Field” – movie about loneliness in infinite sky. Man stays with himself, home-made plane and balance on the limit between death and life." - Audrius Stonys.

An isolated village in the Lithuanian countryside. Seated in her house, an elderly woman recites an old folk story. Then she climbs up the tall ladder that takes her to the rooftop of the church.

Ramin, an ex-wrestler who once won seven matches in 55 seconds, lives alone in the east Georgian town of Kvareli. Long ago he fell in love with a girl with whom he was estranged soon after he met her. Now, at 75, still unmarried but full of life, he travels to a remote village to seek her out. This film presents Ramin's journey through the Georgian landscape and through the memories of this man with a old aged body and an unbeatable heart.

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.

The film is about metamorphosis of wedding traditions. What happened to the old wedding ways and customs that were market by joy, mystery and sadness?

Seven versions of Riga, the city on the Baltic Sea, and its features as seen by outstanding European film directors: Sergei Loznitsa (The Old Jewish Cemetery), Ivars Seleckis (On Ķīpsala), Audrius Stonys (Riga Boats), Jaak Kilmi (Littering Prohibited!), Jon Bang Karlsen (Cats in Riga), Rainer Komers (Daugava Delta), and Bettina Henkel (Theatre Street 6).

Two young men leave a neglected but cozy native nook for a strange seaport town Kenigsberg. There they meet two girls the outsiders like themselves. Any attempt to find a normal human contact leads to misunderstanding. Or perhaps they are also lonely and unhappy. The realities, provoking a forced individualism melt in the atmosphere of the town, on which there lies a seal of historical and human cataclysms.

The film springs from at least three ideas connected to each other in an irrational way: the story of a cow being taken to the butcher, the description of simple pleasures, how to ascend to the top of a hill and descend in a wheelbarrow, and the portraiture of a several blind people. The great, big eyes of the cows are seen in contrast to the unseeing eyes of the blind people.

A sad child is going to pay a visit to her mother in prison. Her solitude is immense. Sitting in the backseat, she looks on in silence outside the window while the landscape passes in front of her eyes.

Sorrow does not come merely from contemplating death, which forces us to look into Eternity, but also from life, which compels us to confront Time", wrote Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev. Renowned Lithuanian documentarist Audrius Stonys took these words as a motto for his latest film, a meditative visual essay which portrays old people undertaking all kinds of activities, meditation and group laughter therapy. Without a single word of commentary, he creates from sophisticated, aesthetic images a compelling study of human corporeality which, in an ideal union with spiritual equilibrium, can sustain us with the pledge that old age doesn't have to be a painful wait for the last breath.

Portrait of Augustinas Baltrušaitis, film and theatre director, as well as actor, who fell into obscurity and has now been relegated to the margins of society, as a result of specific political circumstances. Countdown is a film about the limits of memory, the effects of the implacable passage of time, and a hope that surpasses time.

Fedia – man living in little yellow house next to Gariūnai marketplace. To him life seems simple, completely transparent and without any hidden truths.

"While shooting “Three Days” (director Šarūnas Bartas) I met Georgian Alexander Oboladze. We lived in the same hotel room. From restaurants and parties tycoon he became completely single. For me strange is the situation then man is stranded away from homeland but haven’t lost his mentality, language; just like exotic tree grown up in Lithuania. He was wandering around Vilnius old town, knew every corner and basement of it like no one else. He was looking and finding lost time, things left by other men and creating from it his own unique world." - Audrius Stonys.

The film relates the story of the Kriauleidziai family, who lost the roof over their heads after fire engulfed their home. It also demonstrates man's ability to come to terms with misfortune, not to lose heart, but to start afresh.

"To make this film was a very old dream. The shooting started in 1988, before gaining the independence. Only being of father Stanislovas was something incredible these days. Unlocked doors from his barn where were stored priceless reliquaries, books. Not locked church with artworks inside. Unconditional trust... It impressed not only me." - Audrius Stonys.

With Baltic Way, shot at the end of his film studies, Audrius Stonys seizes the first and irrepressible breath of freedom wafting across the places, bodies and views of his people during the days of “the Baltic way”, a human chain going from Vilnius to Tallinn via Riga, formed of 2 million Baltics demanding their countries’ independence in 1989.

The film features an incredibly low angel’s flight over the dunes of Nida, Trakai castle, the lakes of Aukstaitija (Highlands), the roofs of the Old Town of Vilnius and the fantastically beautiful church steeples. It’s like a mystical gliding just above the treetops, meadows covered by early morning mist, as well as the narrow streets of Vilnius.

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.

During the Swedish-Lithuanian war 300 years ago, the bell of the Plateliai church was apparently dismantled and then left to sink at the centre of the eponymous lake. Stonys followed a scientific diving expedition organised for the purpose of finding the disappeared bell and thus confirming what seems like a popular legend. Like in Countdown, the filmmaker widens his consideration of collective memory and the bringing into crisis of belief.

Film school students try to tackle the problem of the missing additional crosswalk to the Sluškai Palace.