AMantas Kvedaravičius was killed on Saturday in the city that made the Lithuanian known as a major documentary filmmaker in the world of cinema – Mariupol. The Russian raid against Ukraine has claimed a prominent victim from the film scene.
With Kvedaravičius she loses one of her gentlest and most resolute representatives. To the very end, the 45-year-old was considered a cinematic thinker who remained human even when circumstances made it radically more difficult. People in adverse circumstances marked by cruelty and power games were also his subject: the everyday occurrence of violence, the rituals of trying to overcome suffering, pain, torture, war; the fading forces of resistance.
He devoted himself to the analysis of life and death, with sensitivity and the utmost dedication. His existentialism has now taken hold of him. He died “with the camera in his hand,” director colleague Vitali Manski posted on Facebook, shortly after the news of his death came from the press service of the Ukrainian army.
Kvedaravičius wanted to film this historic war. Not in league with the Ukrainian filmmakers who did not leave their country to document Russian war crimes. But on his own, and probably with that quiet, haunting, inquiring power of observation that has shaped his previous oeuvre. That will now remain unfinished.
Three films make up this oeuvre, which is pervaded by a lasting thoughtfulness. Small, silent, enigmatic films when they came out. They will go down in the history of European war cinema as great harbingers of that finiteness that is now a fact.
Over a decade, Kvedaravičius unfolded a whole spectrum of visual anthropology with these just three films. It now awaits evaluation and research. The time will come. The films themselves make it possible to immerse oneself in the material of the world, between dream and reality, horror and everyday life, facts and phenomenal imagology.
Kaurismäki produced Kvedaravičius’ debut
Kvedaravičius’ debut Barzakh premiered in the 2011 Berlinale Panorama and received the Amnesty International Film Prize. Even this documentary film dealing with the Russian war in Chechnya was more than a ‘documentary’.
Produced by Aki Kaurismäki’s company Sputnik Oy and scheduled by The Match Factory, this anti-war film essay-style explores the eeriness of not knowing the whereabouts of loved ones. A man disappears – who knows his fate? Everyday wartime life was in Chechnya (and it’s the same in Ukraine): kidnapping, torture, rape, then contradictory information, concealment, propaganda material, bargaining chips.
“Barzakh” is the word for a place “from where no one returns”. Although the film is also about disappearance and uncertainty, Kvedaravičius’ research represents enlightenment and coming to terms with everyday life in the war, which was forced into oblivion. They give the floor to those – neighbors, relatives – who have experienced something similar. The victims of aggression.
But they also allow the floating area to flash, which brings existence into its transitional zones. “Those who find themselves in the Barzakh,” reads the synopsis of the Berlinale, “are no longer among the living, but also not among those who will be rewarded or punished for their deeds in the afterlife. The Barzakh is a realm that one visits in dreams and where one can learn things that would otherwise remain unknown.”
A year after “Barzakh”, Kvedaravičius received his doctorate in Cambridge – “Knots of absence: death, dreams, and disappearances at the limits of law in the counter-terrorism zone of Chechnya” – noted in the 2012-2013 directory of the prestigious university. It was pain affects that moved him – for them he left political theory behind. To immerse yourself in the realities of everyday wartime in the North Caucasus. The social anthropologist also works as an underwater archaeologist.
Mariupol
“Mariupolis” followed in 2016 – like “Barzakh” shown in the Panorama of the Berlinale, and carried by the poetry of everyday life, it poses a challenge for the viewer: you have to decide for yourself which gesture, which detail you attribute meaning to.
“His academic and cinematic interest is in the political and performative expression of bodies, materiality and absence,” says a biographical marginal note, which, as is well known, often represents autobiographical statements. How much new truth is there in each of these words, which at the time might have sounded abstract. The goEast film festival in Wiesbaden is showing “Mariupolis” in a matinee next Sunday in the Caligari film stage.
Beneath the surface of an ongoing everyday city life – between steelworks and theater group, between choral singing and the laps of a tram driver – accompanied by detonations in the background, fear and death, “Mariupolis” ultimately turned to survival in times of war. “Mariupolis” was an attempt to keep the city alive in the film, which is now really committed to dying and has become a symbol of destruction.
After “Parthenon” (2019), an ethnographic research trip between Kurds, Sudanese, Ukrainians and Greeks, his most enigmatic film, and before he could start shooting his feature film in Uganda, Mantas Kvedaravičius died. It was reserved for a Lithuanian with a Cambridge PhD to testify as a citizen of the world to the historical devastation of Russian imperialist madness – through his violent death.