While on holiday in Paris with her friends, Dovile gets a call from her father, which she rejects, focusing on the dance ring and the rows of shots waiting for her at a bar. Unwittingly, she has just missed her last chance to speak to her parent – back in Vilnius, she finds out that he has suddenly passed away, in an unexplained accident. She freezes on the spot after receiving the news, on a random balcony, while the camera slowly pans out, the sounds fade away, and capital-L Life slowly rears its little heads in the corners of the frame, stubborn in its awful insistence to go on. This is the beginning of Lithuanian filmmaker Dovile Sarutyte’s debut feature, first presented at last year’s edition of Taking Black Nights, and winner of TIFF’s Special Jury Award. Although my stay at Cluj this year was too short for me to have a larger perspective on the festival’s competition, I must say that Feature Film About Life was one of the films that came very close to my heart.

If, at first, what attracted me to the film was its post-modernist (or even post-ironic?) title, which seemed also to contain a meta-cinematic exploration based on found footage culled from private archives, what ended up impressing me was not just the main topic – a young, cosmopolitan woman from the first post-Soviet generation having to face one of the most intimate fears one has in life –, but also the biographical coincidences. It’s hard for me to detach from them while seeing and thinking of this film, not to be objective, given that I had a very similar experience when my own father passed away three years ago – and in contrast to most films about grief, which start either long before the actual death of someone or focus on the months after the burial, Feature Film About Life is a work about how one navigates the process of burying a loved one and of the first days after their loss.

A process both frustrating – as one faces a lot of expenses, many of them pointless, or the pressure of others’ emotions and expectations, of going for all the documents you need and all the seemingly infinite running around in such a short period – and absurd, which, at times bring a smile or laughter to one’s face, no matter how tragic the situation at hand is I can’t even begin to describe how much I laughed (and identified) at the scene where the protagonist goes to see a hunter-style restaurant to see if it’s good for the vigil, or when she summarily rejects a cross as being ugly. Just like Dovile, my outward reaction was to detach, only crying when I was alone at home, thinking of all the missed calls from my dad, after a day of running between institutions, churches, apartments, and funeral services; just like her, I rebelled against all the things that I was forced to do because of tradition, only for me to swallow my pride and go along with them; just like her, I allowed myself to laugh with my relatives; just like her, I rummaged through photos of my father which I could bring to the service, attempting to illustrate a life that was present, not one that was lost. Funeral days are just like a state of trance – and Sarutyte’s repeated use of “Song of a Sinner” by psychedelic rock band Top Drawer perfectly underlines this paradoxical state of suspension and constant movement; while also using its lyrics to underline the all-encompassing feeling of survivor’s guilt.

On top of this, Sarutyte has a special way of looking at post-Soviet space and culture, one that doesn’t dabble in self-exoticism or stereotype for the sake of humor, but that remains very recognizable in terms of topoi – a universe of small businesses that you come into contact with, after your parents and their friends recommend them to you, their “acquaintances” and “tips” that become unavoidable/indispensable when life takes a turn: everything from improvised shops in rusty metal garages to kitsch universes constructed from plywood and double-glazed windows. All of which makes Dovile’s conversation with her friends at the beginning of the film, where they remember eating in supermarkets on family trips abroad, only for them to (fatefully) conclude that they ended up doing the same thing as adults, even more poignant: as much as post-revolutionary generations in Eastern Europe would like to think that their lives are radically different from their parents’, especially within the framework of history, at one point they will inevitably run into the same problems in their own lives.

In his review for Cineuropa, Davide Abbatescianni compares the film to Jacqueline Lentzou’s recent debut, Moon. 66 Questions (2021), in terms of how both integrate VHS footage within their narratives – but I wouldn’t say that it’s the only valid comparison of the two: after all, both films share a young female protagonist faced with the death of their fathers, one imminent, the other already consummated. What truly differentiates the two is the fact that the latter film is auto-fictional, going so far as using the apartment in which the filmmaker grew up as a location, thus using VHS as a means to put the present plot in tension with the past via the use of space (see the recurrent shot of the couch, once modern, now deformed by a dent in the seat). In this sense, this is where the timid promise behind the film’s dry and descriptive title comes to fruition; and here the film reminds somewhat of Ivana Mladenovici’s second feature, Ivana the Terrible (2019) – but if the latter director went as far as to cast herself and her real-life family in the lead roles, Sarutyte steps back: she only shows up in the VHS casettes of her childhood, shot by her real father, fragments of which are peppered throughout the entire film in bigger and smaller flash-backs. Instead, she creates a fictional avatar to represent her – in a muted, almost minimalistic performance by Agne Misiunaite – as a character in the film, similarly to how Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz constructed the auto-fictional character of “Audrey Benac”, building her up across all of her films since Never Eat Alone (2016) with the help of actress Deragh Campbell. (As I’m writing all of these connections down, it’s as if I’m feeling at the rules of a new canon – that of contemporary filmmakers.)

But coming back to the cassettes – it might just be that the most uncanny similarity I discovered between my own life and the film’s inner universe lies in Dovile’s VHS tapes, wherein her dad records her at various times (on New Year’s Eve, taking a nap, playing or riding her skates); I have a very similar cassette of myself in my on home, shot by my father as well. What struck me as similar was not just the similarity of the images – after all, what might be the most appealing thing about home movies is that they’re simultaneously particular, yet somehow universal –, but her way of relating to them: as moments of innocence in the life of both child and adult, fragments of beautiful memories that one clings onto when times are difficult, but that also serves as a reminder of all the un-beautiful things that the domestic camera failed to record. In the film, it’s hinted that Dovile’s father slipped into alcoholism and that their relationship turned cold after the divorce; his messy apartment, filled up with old, hoarded trinkets (truly “a lifetime’s worth” of things) acts as the silent chronicler of his decline.

Sensitive and lively, lacking any useless displays of affectation, Feature Film About Life probably works best for spectators who see it from the same position as me; and it works precisely because it delves deep into the kind of days that either fade from memory, or are made to fade.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.