A film by Donatas Ulvydas Contact: FRALITA FILMS zivile.gallego@fralita.com T.: +37064330022 S. Konarskio St. 49-36 Vilnius LT-03123 Lithuania
SYNOPSIS Emilia is a suspense drama about the fight for freedom in Soviet-repressed Lithuania in a society where a more satiated life seems more important than honour, a clear conscience or humanity. It is the spring of 1972, when young people take to the streets of Kaunas to demand freedom for Lithuania, and Emilia a future actress and the hero of this intriguing drama is marching with the protesting crowd towards the life of their dreams. But everything takes an unexpected turn. Having come to Kaunas with what is perhaps the greatest secret of her life, Emilia has to fight not only for her own fate, but for that of her friends as well. And life in Kaunas is far from what she had dreamed of. She is not sure the lies, betrayal and the love that struck her like lightning will help her keep her secret or even her life. But she is prepared to take on anything for the sake of what she believes in. SHORT VERSION Emilia is a suspense drama based on actual events that tells about freedom during a time when even freedom of speech was prohibited. Destroyed destinies are the smallest price the movie heroes pay for their unconditional love for their country and their unforeseen love for one another.
DONATAS ULVYDAS Donatas Ulvydas was born in 1975 in Siauliai. He graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Music and Theatre. Since than he has been directing films, commercials and music videos. His first creative documentary The Bug Trainer has received numerous national and international awards. His motion picture Tadas Blinda received four awards from the Lithuanian Film Academy and was Lithuania s highest-grossing film ever. Emilia is his seventh film. Selective Filmography Director 2013 How to Steal Your Wife / feature / 93 min 2011 Tadas Blinda: The Legend is Born / feature / 145 min 2009 A Portrait of Our President / documentary / 50 min 2007 The Bug Trainer / creative documentary / 90 min
Director s Statement I spent half of my life in a country ruled by an authoritarian regime. It was a society where people were forced to give away their freedom of movement, thought, speech and self-expression in exchange for a reasonably safe existence. It was a society where you could lead a relatively decent life and even pursue a successful career provided that you did everything as you were told and didn t have any funny ideas, such as human rights or national identity. Those who didn t listen disappeared quietly into a vast system of concentration camps scattered across the most uninhabitable parts of the country called the Soviet Union. Today, very few people remember what it feels like to live under a repressive regime and how much it costs in human lives rather than money to get rid of it. So my objective is to convey this feeling. I want to reach out to audiences and give them a chance to fully immerse themselves into a world where freedom doesn t exist. I want to make them feel the hopelessness, the fear, the futility of one s life; to experience living in a state of continuous compromise with your own conscience, and with the feeling that you are betraying yourself and your country on a daily basis. In a world where speaking out is punishable by death, metaphor is your best friend, poetry becomes more powerful than a penal squad, and the theatre can be the ultimate weapon for striking right at the roots of the regime. This could be any theatre in the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s or 1970s, but Emilia is specifically inspired by the events that took place in and around the Kaunas Drama Theatre in Lithuania. It was precisely the time when two decades of national armed resistance had been crushed, down to the last partisan (who was brutally murdered in 1965), and people were starting to look for other ways of fighting against the Soviet regime. The theatre was the logical choice, with a young, ambitious director named Jonas Jurašas leading the way. Over a period of four years, his troupe produced six stageplays, each of them emerging as a beacon of free will and defiance against the system. Despite all of the efforts of the Soviet secret police agencies to scare him into submission, despite all of the threats and humiliation, he stayed true to himself until he was ultimately forced out of the theatre and out of the country. All of this is history. While working on Emilia, I made a conscious decision not to follow the path of a biographical drama, but rather to dissect all of the events and their participants into dramatic functions and situations and then bring them back together in a fictional story. Fiction gives you the freedom to interpret historical facts (however true) for maximum dramatic impact, and to combine different personalities to produce more interesting characters with more powerful motives. That is how Emilia was born the main character, pure in her innocence, with her eyes wide open to the world, yet haunted by the tragic events of her early childhood. Emilia is something of a strange tabula rasa pure, yet tainted; peaceful, yet charged with drama. This position serves as a good driver for the dramatic clash with the sadistic KGB operative Grigaitis and through him with the overall inhumanity of the Soviet regime. The theatre provides the perfect stage for visual symbolism and serves as a scale model of society as a whole torn between loyalty to the system and dreams of freedom. In this surreal plane of existence, you must kill yourself as a human in order to survive as a person. Today, more nations democracies both new and old are stepping on a path leading back to authoritarianism just like they did over 70 years ago. To avoid the mistakes of the past, we must not only remember them, but learn from them as well. And this is exactly what I wanted to achieve with my film. I do not turn back with Emilia to look for new ideals. I turn back to celebrate the people who lived by them and who, by living and dying, brought us to the point where we can once again speak out freely and openly.
MAIN CAST Emilia Marius Ieva Andrejevaitė Darius Gumauskas Grigaitis Tauras Čižas Kristina Severija Janušauskaitė Julius Česlovas Ramūnas Šimukauskas Česlovas Stonys Jonas Korsakas Remigijus Vilkaitis Actor Vidas Petkevičius MAIN CREW Director Screenwriter Donatas Ulvydas Jonas Banys Script Consultant Clare Downs Director of Photography Rytis Kurkulis Production Designer Costume Designer Sigita Šimkūnaitė Neringa Keršulytė Hair & Make-up Aušra Juškaitė Rosegard Sound Designer Artūras Pugačiauskas Film Post-production Original Music Producer Kostas Radlinskas Jonas Jurkūnas Živilė Gallego
Film supported by: The Lithuanian Film Centre Lithuanian National Television The MEDIA Programme of the European Union Vilnius City Municipality Kaunas City Municipality The film was developed in cooperation with EAVE (European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs).