Baltic Film Blog

My name is Kristina – a University of Exeter film graduate (MA, BA), Lithuanian film enthusiast and a self-published writer.

Here you can expect to find:

my articles about Lithuanian films from an emigrant’s perspective

occasional texts about other Baltic nation cinemas

my books, in case you are interested

Lithuanian poetry in translation

Why do I write about film?

For a small film industry, such as the Lithuanian one, media exposure plays an important role in establishing the film and the filmmaker, which acquires the audiences and secures revenues. While researching for my dissertation on affect and the portrayal of death in Baltic documentaries, I realised that even though Lithuania releases a relatively high number of documentaries, hardly any academic research has been carried out on the post-Soviet contributions to this genre. I had to rely on the films themselves, trying to legitimise my analysis by using well-established foreign film theory. I sifted through often simplistic filmmaker interviews in hopes of finding some deeper insights to fuel my intuition and struggled to create content by using my knowledge of Lithuanian economy, geopolitics and history. This made the process of researching unnecessarily daunting, incomplete and even self-gratifying because no previously written source could contradict my hypotheses. The burden rationed to the citizens of small countries has been unexpectedly placed on me too. It required me to accurately represent my national cinema as well as my nation while being fully aware that my words can easily be used to feed the existing stereotypes on the Eastern Europe. This relatively unimportant piece of work became the only point of reference to its foreign reader.

Upon sensing this casual injustice and the subsequent discomfort it caused me, the idea for the Baltic Film Blog was born. The goal is to facilitate the existence of different voices in Lithuanian film (and other marginal film industries) and encourage reflection on the richness and variety of our cinematic cultures as well as the different ways we can approach them academically.