Audiences travelled 6,000 miles across Russia at the Bright Nights film festival screening of The Excursionist on Feb. 8 at Carleton’s River Building.
The Lithuanian film tells the story of a young orphan girl who escapes the mass deportation of Lithuanians to the gulags of Siberia after the Second World War. Dependent on the kindness of others, 11-year-old Marija makes her way through the forests, trains, boarding schools, and homes of Soviet Russia, encountering constant danger before eventually returning to her home in Lithuania.
According to Jonas Skardinskas, a plenipotentiary from the Embassy of Lithuania, the film tells a “very touching, very personal story,” one that holds a great deal of emotional weight for Lithuanians.
“This movie is built of real stories,” he said.
“What the creators of the movie tried to do is to somehow transfer the story, which is very deeply rooted in the history of Lithuania, to show it also to the world, how it happened,” he said.
Audience member Daina Brauns said her Latvian background brought her to the festival.
“We came on Friday to the Latvian movie and it was very, very, heavy. And this was heavy but in a kind of life-affirming way,” she said.
Bright Nights programmer Jerrett Zaroski said The Excursionist is one of the festival highlights. He praised the performance of actress Anastasija Marčenkaitė, and the hard-hitting emotional pull of the story. He also said the film is an impressive accomplishment for Lithuania.
“It’s clearly high budget, too, which you don’t often see coming from smaller countries,” he said. “It’s remarkable what they’ve done.”
The film also allows audiences to learn about a little-known chapter in Lithuanian history. Zaroski said this educational aspect is also part of the Canadian Film Institute mandate.
The Bright Nights Baltic Nordic film festival is currently in its fifth year. Zaroski said it has hit a good stride.
“We’ve had an increase of attendance each year and it’s great to see it grow to see audiences come out. There’s great energy and I think the films this year are some of the best we’ve had,” he said.
The final four films of the festival will be shown Feb. 13-14. These include The Good Son, a dark comedy about a strange mother-son relationship, and Ash, a documentary about farming families in Iceland whose lives are still affected by the April 2010 volcanic eruption. The festival closes Feb. 14 with a screening of Cherry Tobacco—a “charming coming of age story,” Zaroski said.
He said the festival, which partners with Winterlude, is the perfect event for a Canadian winter.
“The Baltic Nordic countries all have similar snow and landscapes to Canada— there’s a lot of shared themes in cinema as well of isolation and dark humour that come sometimes with the climate.”
