Koridorius
Lithuania / Germany,
1994, 79 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Sarunas Bartas
- prod
-
Sarunas Bartas
- scr
-
Sarunas Bartas
- cam
-
Rimvydas Leipus
- editor
-
Mingaile Murmulaitiene
- cast
-
Katerina Golubeva, Viacheslav Amiranian, Sarunas Bartas, Eimuntas Nekroshius, Mantvydas Janekiunas
- source
-
NFM/IAF Distribution
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
OTHER
In his second feature film, Lithuanian director Sarunus Bartas continues in a narrative style that is so evocative, so meditative, so minimal, you could think the spirit of Dreyer was hovering over him. The Corridor is a collage of protagonists, inhabitants of a gloomy apartment building in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. They are lost, immersed in themselves. It is winter. Nothing much happens. In gritty black-and-white, Bartas sketches a decaying world of silent, dreadful waiting; the dread interrupted only by some occasional chance event: a young girl looks at her body in a mirror; a boy sets fire to sheets hanging in the courtyard. Fragments of memories and shards of experience dissolve into a tone poem of longing for lost relationships and beliefs. Narrative logic gives way to the poetry of loss, mourning, desire and renewed faith. Bartas himself has referred to the atmosphere he has so poetically created as that of “a corridor between yesterday and tomorrow, which has several doors, but you do not know to where they lead.” The film is a remarkable portrayal of the state of mind of the immediate post-breakup no man’s land of the Soviet Union. “It’s a film,” said Bartas, “about the extremes of exhaustion caused by loneliness, aggression and love. A stock-taking of the post-Soviet reality. In an unending chaos, people find some small light, which they quickly lose, so they have to search again.”
—Jonas Mekas
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
