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The 8th edition of EU Film Days commencing on May 28 at the National Film Center will present two internationally acknowledged Lithuanian film makers – the avant-guarde film diarist Jonas Mekas and his disciple Julius Ziz.

Jonas Mekas Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
16 mm, B/W&Colour, 88 min, 1972

Jonas Mekas culled footage from his first trip back to his homeland after 25 years in exile. The three-part structure shows his early time in New York in 1950, a family reunion in the village of Semeniskiai where he was born and a subsequent trip through Germany and Austria. The film traces a seemingly divergent, often contradictory, and inevitably irreconcilable personal odyssey that, nevertheless, instinctively converges towards the filmmaker's acute and inescapable awareness of his own spiritual displacement, sense of otherness, and perpetual exile.


Julius Ziz The Window
35 mm, B/W&Colour, 18min, 1989
Premier in Japan

Shot in Lithuania, The Window is a portrait of the filmmaker's grandmother.
"Julius Ziz short non-narrative film The Window at once establishes a significant new film artist whose control and understanding of the expressive power of cinema is extraordinarily compelling. Ziz' verse is shadow, his lyric interior landscape. Nuanced and inflected by subtle changes in color and sound, The Window is like a melancholic poem, both crystalline and ambiguous, about serenity and passage."
Laurence Kardish, Senior curator of the Film Department, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Screening schedule: