French New Wave meets Lithuanian youth in a stylish coming-of-age story about love, freedom and finding yourself.

On the threshold of adulthood, Tomas is a restless romantic, not yet quite ready for the roles waiting to be assigned to him. When he slips away from a museum visit with his schoolmate Eglė, first love takes hold – exhilarating and painful in equal measure, fraught with uncertainty, jealousy and the intoxicating taste of freedom. Eglė’s growing attachment to her art teacher unsettles Tomas, while the sensual dancer Gina offers a glimpse of a far more reckless way of life.

Drawing on Estonian author Mati Unt’s debut novel “Farewell, Yellow Cat”, Araminas’s “When I Was a Child” brings the freshness of the French New Wave to late-1960s Vilnius. From its youthful freeze-frame opening to its pop music, widescreen black-and-white photography, modern city spaces and casually stylish protagonists, the film seems closer in spirit to Truffaut and his contemporaries than to the conventions of Soviet cinema. Adolescent uncertainty, melancholy and rebellion are infused with a playful hunger for freedom, while a deeper tension runs between inherited tradition and the desire to live on one’s own terms.

A cinematographer before becoming a director, Araminas gives the story an elegant visual lightness and a keen sensitivity to fleeting glances, gestures and shifts of mood. In the final scene, Eglė wipes the clown make-up from Tomas’s face – a tender image of growing up without surrendering one’s true self.

Eva Näripea