Alone

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The story of a grave under the roots of a big oak. Three unknown soldiers rest in it- two Russians and a German. After more than 70 years, a group of archaeologists decided to go on a quest to explore this.

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 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.

Kristīne Briede and Audrius Stonys’s meditative documentary essay portrays the less-remembered generation of cinema poets of the Baltic New Wave. With finesse, they push beyond the barriers of the common historiographic investigation in order to achieve a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation.