Latvia: Western "Look" of Lithuania's Countryside and Actors)

fought on against the Soviets in struggles that lasted until 1952 and 1948
respectively and produced many casualties.) This same decade witnessed

the poetic children's films of Arunas Zhebrunas (b. 1931—The Girl and
the Echo [Devushka i ekho, 1965]; The Little Prince, 1967) and the literary
adaptations of Raymondas Vabalas (b. 1937—Stairs to the Sky [Lesnitsa
v nebo, 1966]) and former cinematographer Algirdas Araminas (b.
1937—When I Was Young [Kogda byl malenkim, 1969]). During the
Brezhnev years, Lithuanian cinema turned to traditional genres—e.g.,
Vabalas' detective film Near the Boundary (1973) and Zhebrunas' musical
The Devil's Bride (1974)—as well as to the adaptation for Soviet
central television of works by such Western authors as Jack London,
Theodore Dreiser, and G. K. Chesterton (this apparently owing to the
Western "look" of Lithuania's countryside and actors).
In the eighties, however, the poetically stylized work of Algimantas
Puipa (b. 1951) began to appear, and his A Woman and Her four Men
(Zhenshchina i chetero ee muzhchin, 1983) won acclaim at several international
festivals. This adaptation of a nineteenth-century Danish novel
relocated to the Lithuanian coast pits a family of peasant fishermen
against an extreme physical and political environment representing the
contemporary situation in the Soviet Union. In the era of glasnost, the
new "openness" promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev after his succession to
the Party Secretariat in 1995 (see p. 823), Puipa's films grew increasingly
direct in their nationalism and experimental in form—Eternal Light
(Vechnoye siyaniye, 1987) is a grim rural romance set in 1956, during
796 · The Former Soviet Union, 1945-Present
the height of Sovietization, while Fish Day (Zuvies diena, 1990) is a portrait
of a self-obsessed artist living at the fringes of communal life. Ticket
to Taj Mahal (Biletas iki Taj Mahal, 1991; produced by the Katarsis
Film Cooperative, Kazakhstan) is Puipa's most complex work to date, a
blending of historical reconstruction and fantasy set during the postwar
partisan struggle with the Soviets, which suggests that the only way to
escape some forms of political oppression is in our dreams.
The appearance of films with overt anti-Soviet content coincided with
Lithuania's declaration of independence on March 11,1990. (Latvia and
Estonia declared their independence in August 1991, a week after the
aborted coup in Moscow.) Jonas Vaitkus' Awakening (Probuzhdeniye,
1990) was adapted from an agitational stage play about the fate of individuals
caught up in the political terror following the Soviet annexation
in 1940. Similar in theme is The Children from Hotel "America"
(Ramundas Banionis, 1990), based on a true incident that occurred in
1972 in Kaunas, Lithuania's historical capital, when some teenagers tried
to recreate a Woodstock-style rock festival and were brutalized by the
KGB. But perhaps the most disturbing film to come from Lithuania in
recent years is the haunting documentary Homecoming (Petrus Abukevicius,
1990), recounting the secret deportation and genocide of nearly
one-quarter of Lithuania's population in Stalin's Gulag concentration
camps, 1940—41 and 1944, and the survivors' retrieval of their loved
ones' remains at the expense of the Soviet state, a policy introduced by
Gorbachev during the period of glasnost preceding the dissolution of
the USSR.
Latvia
The film industries of Latvia (population 2.7 million) and Estonia
(population 1.6 million) are considerably smaller than Lithuania's but
significant nonetheless. Under Soviet domination, Latvia's Riga Film Studio
produced ten to twelve features a year and was well known for its
detective films, children's films, and documentaries. In fact, it was the
glasnost-era documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? (Legko li byt molodym?,
Juris Podnieks, 1987) that first focused world attention on the
plight of the Baltic nations under Soviet rule. The film follows a variety
of Latvian young people over a two-year period, cinéma-vérité fashion,
as they seek to give some shape and direction to their lives within the
rigid constraints of the communist system, and it became the model for a
number of disillusioned Soviet youth films of the late eighties. Stylistically
expressive and technically inventive, Is It Easy to Be Young? ultimately
conveys a sense of hopelessness and futility, especially with regard to the
poisonous effect of the Afghan war on Soviet youth and society generally
(one of the few clear choices open to young men in the late Soviet era
was to join the army and go to Afghanistan—many of the youths at the
film's conclusion are shown to have become disabled veterans of that
war).* Since 1990, Latvia's production system has been restructured

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fought on against the Soviets in struggles that lasted until 1952 and 1948

respectively and produced many casualties.) This same decade witnessed

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