The Corridor

Black and white, 35 mm
Lithuania, 1995, 80 min
Section: Baltic Films

Synopsis

Bartas characterised his strongly poetic movie as a “film about the extreme consequences of exhaustion born of solitude, aggression and love”, whose total fusion is part of the post-Soviet experience. Depicting the lives of the melancholic inhabitants of a shabby housing block, the film develops as an associative collage of fragments of memory and experience, merging with events which randomly occur among the residents. The “corridor” is a metaphor for their interwoven lives, signifying the transition between “yesterday and today with many side doors”. As in other films by the director, here the narrative logic is suppressed in favour of a poetic expression which speaks of loss and desire. The impression of illusion and abstraction is intensified by the use of black-and-white film.

About the director

Šarunas Bartas (b. 1964, Lithuania) studied at Moscow’s VGIK. He first made two documentaries: the semi-amateur film Tofolaria (1986) and The Remembrance of the Last Day, 1990). The feature-length film Three Days (Trys dienos, 1991) won the Ecumenical Jury prize at the Berlin IFF in 1992 for its detailed treatment of pressing issues, and also the FIPRESCI prize for its original style, consequential theme and artistic imagery. It tells the story (almost without plot) of three young Lithuanians on a visit to Kaliningrad, after several decades a wasted and decimated city. Bartas also ignored traditional scripting in his later films: Corridor (1995), Few of Us (1996), The House (1997) and Freedom (2000). For his last three films he won the Lithuanian National Culture and Art Prize in 2001.