Sharunas Bartas
France/Lithuania/Portugal
Highly regarded on the festival circuit as the most innovative filmmaker working today in Eastern Europe, Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas, together with producer Paulo Branco, returns to Un Certain Regard after their success there last year with Few of Us. That sparse but riveting tale, which was also photographed by Bartas, followed a girl on a journey to an isolated cabin in the Sayan mountains of south central Siberia on the border of Mongolia.
Of all the would-be aspirants to fill the shoes of the late Andrei Tarkovsky, only Alexander Sokurov in St Petersburg and Sharunas Bartas in Vilnius, a graduate of the Moscow Film School (VGIK), have achieved a measure of respect as stylists with vision. And the latter seemed almost effortless in his handful of documentaries, experimental films and feature films sketching the spiritual landscape of the inner self.
Bartas' diploma film, the short Tofolaria (1986), was the forerunner to Few of Us, just as the documentary Memory of Things Past (1990) scores as a companion piece to Three Days (1991), his debut feature (presented in Berlin in the Forum) about young people meeting by chance on an aimless and depressing excursion to Kaliningrad, the postwar Russian city plastered over the ruins to the Prussian capital of Koenigsberg.
For The House, a sort of "ode to the home" which recalls his earlier experimental film Corridor (1995), Bartas is supported for the first time by a cast of well-known names. French director Leos Carax, a confessed admirer of the Lithuanian director, appears, as does French-Italian actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. Ron Holloway
Prod co: Studio Kinema, Gemini Films, La Sept Cinema, Madragoa Filmes
Prod: Paulo Branco
Dir: Sharunas Bartas
Scr: Sharunas Bartas
Ph: Sharunas Bartas, Rimvydas Leipus
Ed: Mingaile Murmulaitiene
Snd: Vladimir Golovnitsky, Sergei Siniavsky
Cast: Francisco Nascimento, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Alex Descas, Leos Carax, Micaela Cardoso, Jean-Louis Loca
Running time: 120 mins
Int sales: Gemini Films
