Legendary Lithuanian auteur Šarūnas Bartas transforms unbearable personal loss into a work of rare cinematic intimacy.

Šarūnas Bartas is one of the great, elusive figures of Lithuanian cinema – a director whose rare films have defined an era and influenced generations. With “Laguna”, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, he turns his gaze inward, confronting a rupture so devastating it feels like the collapse of the world: the loss of his daughter Ina Marija.

Set on the Pacific coast of Mexico, where Ina had chosen to live before her untimely death, Bartas and his younger daughter Una retrace her steps through a landscape of mangroves battered by storms yet endlessly reborn. What unfolds is not only a meditation on grief, but a fragile act of resurrection, as fragments of Ina’s presence are gathered from nature, memory, and the rhythms of the sea.

The camera here is startlingly close – almost impossibly present in moments of private sorrow – and transforms grief into cinema of rare intimacy. In “Laguna”, Bartas undertakes a challenge few filmmakers would dare: to turn unspeakable personal loss into a work of art, without losing its raw truth. The result is a documentary as intimate as it is universal, anchored by a director whose voice remains legendary in the Baltic film landscape.

Marianna Kaat