Film: "The Life and Death of a Humanist Woman, or Be Smaller than a Poppy-seed"

Session Submission Type: Film Screening

Abstract

This film, by Marta Vosyliūtė (freelance artist), is a 56 min story in seven parts, crafted from over 300 original drawings and accompanied by brief commentaries in the form of subtitles. It serves as a Soviet and post-Soviet artistic exploration of a single human life, employing memory games, autoethnography, and vicarious memory to blur the lines between collective and personal experience. It’s a silent film, and the deliberate absence of dialogue keeps the viewer engrossed in the timeline for almost one hour.
The narrative centers on a woman from a small town, who graduated from university and embarked on a professional career while raising a child alone. She learned several languages, read professional literature in libraries, and left a mark on scientific research. Despite her achievements, she never published her own book. Most of the scientists from that era are now dead and forgotten.
In Soviet times, this generation faced unspeakable trials – their families torn apart, some members killed by the occupants or exiled to Siberia – necessitating several survival strategies of “forgetting”, “selecting”, “silencing” themselves and their children, and “double-thinking”. Love found expression in gestures – parents giving their children homemade food and, later, material goods, – as verbal affirmation risked the watchful eye of the big brother.
The film adopts an aesthetic of anti-aesthetic, its aggressive colors serving as a stark reminder that “Jesus never came”, as one drawing says. For overthinkers, senility poses a unique challenge.

Short Bio

Marta Vosyliūtė was born in Vilnius. She graduated from M. K. Čiurlionis Art School and studied at the Vilnius Art Academy in Stage Design, and received her BA (1999) and MA (2001) diplomas.
In 2006 she finished postgraduate studies. Marta Vosyliūtė is participating in painting, drawing and other shows and has made several personal exhibitions. She has done stage design for more than a 30 plays in drama, musical theatre and dance performances all over Lithuania and is especially interested in non-traditional spaces for performing arts. Vosyliūtė also writes critical texts on different culture themes, essay texts, participates in conferences.
www.marta.lt
Film exists with Lithuanian and English subtitles.

Sub Unit

• Special Events

Session Organizer

• Marta Vosyliūtė, freelance artist