Director Arunas Matelis’s personal experience as a father of a girl with leukemia is to ‘blame’ for this sentimental, but not pathetical film that moved the jury of famous IDFA. After his little girl had survived an eight-month therapy and got well, Matelis did not forget the children he had left in the hospital in Lithuanian capital Vilnius. Their parents are also experiencing hard times. However, what we are witnessing in this film is not suffering, at least not directly, but rather the children’s strong lust for life, their desire to replace hospital food with the junk food like hamburgers or Coca Cola and to become doctors, though not in a leukemia ward... In short, it is a film about life, not death.
Arūnas Matelis
Arūnas Matelis was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1961. He studied mathematics and he obtained a degree in theater and television at the Lituanian Musical Academy. In 1991, he founded Nominum, one of the first independent production houses in Lithuania which produces ‘creative’ documentaries, as Matelis likes to call them. These have also been liked by the festival juries in Cannes, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Oberhausen. Among them are: ‘Flight over Lithuania or 510 of silence’ (2004), ‘SUNDAY: The Gospel According Liftman Albertas’ (2003).
General sponsor
Prieš Parskrendant į Žemę
Germany, Lithuania
2005, 52', color, 35 mm
Directed by:
Arūnas Matelis
Screenplay by:
Arūnas Matelis
Cinematography:
Audrius Kemezys
Edited by:
Katharina Schmidt
Music:
Kipras Masanauskas
Producers:
Gerd Haag, Arunas Matelis
Produced by:
Tag/Traum, Studio Nominum
