Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Karolis Kaupini's Nova Lituania is exclusively showing November 9 - December 8, 2020 on Mubi in the Debuts series.It starts as an idea, grows into a theory, and dies as a dream. It’s the late 1930s, and Lithuania is cornered by warring neighbors. Vilnius, the country’s capital, has long been gobbled up by Poland, and the growing tension between Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Russia will soon leave the tiny Baltic state in the middle of a crossfire. Pacing nervously in a semi-deserted lecture hall, geography professor Feliksas Gruodis points at a map of Lithuania, and one of Africa: “just like vast underpopulated areas of Africa once drew white colonists, so we are in the same position.” The solution? To build another state - better yet, to ship the existing one overseas, and found a colony where people...
- 11/19/2020
- MUBI
In the late 1930s, prior to emigrating to the United States, Lithuanian geographer Kazys Pakstas proposed a radical solution to what he saw as the inevitable eradication of the nation through its assimilation into the German and Russian spheres of influence: The purchase and annexation of a large tract of land on the African or American continent, and the creation there of a “backup Lithuania.” Eighty years later, filmmaker Karolis Kaupinis has taken this eccentric idea as the kernel of truth from which his beautifully poker-faced feature debut can sprout into an elegant, offbeat fiction that is both steeped in pre-war Lithuanian history and starkly relevant to our current moment — wherever nationalism is being invoked for political capital by powerful cowards. Which is to say: almost everywhere.
In appropriate 4:3 ratio (boxed in on either side like the beleaguered nation it examines), and in crisp black-and-white, ‘Nova Lituania’ opens with little context or hand-holding.
In appropriate 4:3 ratio (boxed in on either side like the beleaguered nation it examines), and in crisp black-and-white, ‘Nova Lituania’ opens with little context or hand-holding.
- 7/2/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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