“Reality TV is junk food in comparison to this nourishing feast of human experience.” - Stephen Garrett, Time Out
Tuesday, December 6 at 6pm | Mekas returns to the Lithuanian village where he was born for the first time since he and his brother fled in the ‘40s. One of the most authentic documents of the exile experience, Mekas captures the bittersweet reunions with his homeland and presents a visual poem of memory, culture, and loss. As Mekas observed, “As a displaced person, I felt that I had lost so much, my country, my family, even my early written diaries, ten years of them, that I developed the need to try to retain everything I was passing through, by means of my Bolex camera. When you go through what I went through...you don’t understand human beings anymore...I just film, record everything, with no judgment, that I see. Not exactly ‘everything,’ only the brief moments that I feel like filming. What makes me choose those moments? I don’t know. It’s my whole past memory that makes me choose the moments that I film.”
Jonas Mekas 100!: This December, we're celebrating the life and work of Jonas Mekas (1922 - 2019), one of the most influential voices in cinema, and considered by many to be the "godfather of avant-garde cinema." Though his oeuvre spanned seven decades and includes dozens of titles, the eight programs in our Mekas 100 presentation exemplify the heart of what Mekas distinctively captures so often: daily life. View full program here.
This series is made possible by, and presented with generous support from, the Consulate General of Lithuania in Chicago and the Lithuanian Culture Institute.
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