Programmer Vladas Rožėnas

Queer (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

MASTERS
If you love David Lynch, step into the most Lynchian film of the year.

It carries an unmistakably American philosophy where dreams and visions break into physical reality, and life itself becomes a mystic journey for its characters. The film takes the most challenging path: deepening the mystery rather than unraveling it, weaving answers into an even tighter web. But isn’t that exactly what we seek in cinema? Sometimes, it’s not about finding solid ground but learning to exist without it.

Escape from 21st Century (dir. Yang Li)

MIDNIGHT SCREAMS
Has anyone in 2024 packed more techniques, ideas, and cinematic experiments into a single film? If so, I haven’t seen it. There’s something exhilarating about a film that gives 110% of itself, overflowing with creativity in every scene, treating every frame as an opportunity to inject even more humor. Don’t go if you’re only searching for existentialism. Go if you’re ready to completely lose your mind for two hours.

Songs of Slow Burning Earth (dir. Olha Zhurba)

COMPETITION
If I had to choose one word for this film, it would be normal. It’s about war becoming normal. And about the normality of not wanting to watch yet another war film. There is already too much suffering in the world, far too much. But for me, Songs became that one Ukrainian film that resonated with an inner fracture: How do you continue to feel in a world where such evil exists? How do you keep living with that knowledge? How can you be normal when everything around you isn’t? And in the end, what does normal even mean?

Hard truths (dir. Mike Leigh)

MASTERS
No one makes family dramas like Mike Leigh. I won’t lie, this genre isn’t usually my favorite. The mother is always smashing plates, the children always feel unloved. It seems… too simple? The protagonist of Hard Truths also feels almost too dramatic to be real. But within her sharpness lies something deeply sensitive, something carefully hidden beneath the surface. This isn’t just a film about unresolved family tensions. It’s a question posed directly to the audience: What is the true cost of forgiving someone? And what is the cost of not forgiving?

Dead Man (dir. Jim Jarmusch)

JIM JARMUSCH RETROSPECTIVE
The most iconic Jim Jarmusch film, the one that made his name, on the big screen? And not just any screening, but an actual film screening? That says it all.

Grand Theft Hamlet (dir. Pinny Grylls, Sam Cran)

SCREEN 9
Hamlet and GTA seem like such radically different worlds that, even after hearing about Grand Theft Hamlet, it takes a moment to wrap your head around it. But the combination works – especially when viewed through the lens of the pandemic, a time when people had to improvise, to find new ways to express themselves, even if those ways felt strange. That’s what this entire film is: an attempt to be heard when the usual means of reaching an audience no longer exist.