The slippery, unpredictable nature of time and memory stands at the center of Laurynas Bareiša’s latest foray into narrative filmmaking. The audience can never be quite certain of where they stand in relation to the dramatic scenario that slowly unfurls over the course of Drowning Dry (2024). The slightly queasy sensations that it provokes in audience members should endear it to fans of Ivan Passer’s work, but it isn’t necessarily the angsty Eastern European mood piece that you might expect. Its fragmented nature keeps it at arm’s length, but that ends up being one of its greatest charms. There’s nothing quite like the pleasure that one can derive from being frustrated and challenged by a deliberately obtuse work of art. 

Drowning Dry is Lithuania’s submission for Best International Feature film at the 2025 Academy Awards. Zita Short had the opportunity to speak with director Laurynas Bareiša.

Zita Short: What drew you toward this project? 

Laurynas Bareiša: This film was a bit of a continuation of what happened in my previous film. I made a movie called Pilgrims (2021), and then I went through a bit of a strange period in my life. While trying to cope with everything, I started writing it. I developed it while in Venice and wanted to go through this process so I could move forward. You don’t want to get stuck working on just one film. I am actually doing something similar now. I am writing yet another film. I had an experience with my child where they didn’t drown but ended up choking. It was an almost tragic event that brought out both good emotions and bad emotions. I kind of started writing this film thinking about how it could have ended very, very badly, but it didn’t. You feel very impacted by it, but you either move on or don’t move on. 

Zita Short: You also experimented with a flashback structure. Are you interested in playing around with experimental storytelling techniques? 

Laurynas Bareiša: For me, it’s important that the structure of a film and how the story is told is always reflected in the script. My first film was very much about places and locations. The geographical aspects of that story were very significant. In the case of this film, it was very important to think about memories and traumatic experiences. For me, memory is always connected with repetition. You also go back, and every time you go back, something changes. I think this duality, this repetition, this doubling…is very much in the fabric of this film. Going back to similar circumstances or the same situation is very, very important for me. It’s one of the basic aspects of memory. I put it somewhere, but the film itself is created by thinking about what happens when you try to go back and remember. 

Zita Short: How do you define Lithuanian national cinema?

Laurynas Bareiša: It’s kind of hard to define because there are so many different periods. Our early cinema is very much connected to our occupation, to the Soviet Union, and to the cultural system of this regime that wasn’t ours. We were part of this bigger Soviet Empire, and we were subjugated. Even the films that are now considered classics are still tainted by this relationship to that power and a relationship in which we couldn’t express ourselves. Personally, I don’t take anything from that period. It’s kind of hard for me to relate to those films. After we regained independence in the 1990s and the 2000s, art suffered because of the economic crisis that we faced. We even use the term “the lost generation” to refer to directors who weren’t able to work during that period and had to go into other fields. We have very few films from that period. 

From 2010 onward, after the foundation of the film center and after the economy picked up, we have a new generation of directors emerging. We all share this belief that we need to find our cultural identity and that we need to find our identity in the world and in a place for Lithuanian artists. We are all very, very different, but we are defined by our need to express our beliefs. We are all quite young in a way, but we have no tradition that pushes us. We have no masters; we do have some admired directors, but there is nothing that puts us in a box. So you have filmmakers like Marija Kavtaradze, with her film Slow (2023), that allows for the development of a strong identity. Even now, you have countries that are free, at least on paper, that are still subjugated on a cultural level. We kind of have this room to try different things and keep our individuality as filmmakers. I think I could define this period of Lithuanian cinema as not yet formed. We are still in the process of forming. We have all these young directors with new ideas, so there’s hope. 

Zita Short: What was it like juggling the roles of director and cinematographer while on set?

Laurynas Bareiša: I have a degree in cinematography, so it wasn’t too difficult for me, but at first, it was a bit strange on set. I had to do a lot of running around between the gaffers and everyone else on set, but because I had a very good cast, they were all there together. In the end, I kind of settled, and I was able to go to them first. I also worked with a great crew, so nobody pushed me. I had time, and in the end, I was able to find my own rhythm. It was a bit stressful, and the child actors on set ended up calling me “Coach” because I was always running around and wearing these basketball shorts.

RaMell Ross is the co-writer and director of Nickel Boys a story spanning decades from the segregation era, the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, through to the early part of the new millennium. It focuses primarily on two characters who meet in a Florida Reformatory School called The Nickel Academy. Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herrise) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson).

Elwood grew up with his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in Tallahassee and due to an inspiring teacher was just about to go to college on a scholarship before he was found hitchhiking in a stolen car. Turner grew up in Houston fighting for survival in poverty. Once they become Nickel Boys they challenge, inspire, and educate each other while also protecting one another from State sponsored and enabled racially motivated abuse.

RaMell Ross’ debut fictional feature is profound and monumentally important filmmaking. Nadine Whitney had the honor of speaking to RaMell from Naarm, Melbourne, Australia about his work and the creation of a visual language.

Nadine Whitney: Nickel Boys is an extraordinary gift. One of the most empathetic, tactile, beautiful, horrifying, and hopeful experiences in cinema this year and perhaps, for me, in a
lifetime. Humanistic and devastating. I felt I was there with Elwood and Turner. I felt the absence, I felt the presence. I was not just observing I was part of it.

Great cinema transports you into not only the world of the characters and the narrative and thematic setting of a film, but also completely into their very essence and being. Audiences around the world live inside, and by the side, of the Nickel Boys. We have you, Joslyn Barnes, and Jomo Fray to thank for that.

RaMell Ross: Thank you. It’s such a gift to be able to be given permission to even pursue this type of film.

We felt like the whole time that it was unprecedented and almost at every stage never believed that we would get to the next. Not even in a cynical way, just like, there’s no way that they’re going to go for this treatment. There’s no way they’re going to go for the script. There’s no way that we’re only going to have two versions of the script and now they want to go into production and in two months. No way!

I appreciate when someone expresses their connection to it. And expresses it as eloquently you did. To call it tactile. Because it does it reminds us of the awe of the process. The awe of the film existing.

Nadine Whitney: Nickel Boys is a film which inspires awe in the audience. I have spoken to people who said they could not breathe at times they were so immersed.

Jomo Fray is a cinematographer of tactile poetics. He has constructed a unique rendering of the personal point of view. With Raven Jackson in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and with Barry Jenkins in another Colson Whitehead adaptation The Underground Railway. Can you talk to me about your collaborative process?

RaMell Ross: Working with Jomo was pretty astounding. I know what the film should look like. I know how to frame. I shot my last film (the award-winning documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening) and I’m a working photographer. But I don’t know how to light anything. I don’t know the language of these machines. I also don’t know camera rigs. I don’t know a lot, but I have a strong sense. Jomo has both. He knows everything about cinema and cinema techniques. But he also has this emotional relationship with how to make images feel a certain way.

Jomo knows what lighting techniques are the simplest and most out of the way in order to make a film that matched my large format photography. A film that is as dense as this really expensive and old-school slide film that I use (Fuji). He very much shapes the emotional volume and density of the image.

It’s not something that’s easy to consider. It’s a very specific understanding of media. It was a thrill to build the language with him. We were filling in each other’s gaps. I can’t imagine shooting another film without Jomo.

Nadine Whitney: Jomo should be hired for everything, ever, forever.

RaMell Ross: (Laughing) Every film? I would love to see what a rom-com looks like with Jomo’s
images. I may actually be deeply moved by them for the first time ever!

Nadine Whitney: Adaptation is something that happens on several levels. A lot of people will have read Colson’s novel, but they will be stunned at the way you have delivered the work. Can you tell me about your process with Joslyn and any work you might have done with Colson?

RaMell Ross: I think to our benefit Colson did not play any role. I think he selected me with
producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. Once we were moving into production, I wrote him a really long email thanking him for being himself and giving me giving me this opportunity, et cera, et cetera. He wrote back, “Thanks, good luck.”

At first, I’m like, oh, man, he doesn’t want to be my friend, you know? But then I realized it’s kind of him allowing me and Jos to imagine in his material. I can’t imagine a kinder gift than to let us let us do our thing. So, we set out to do that.

Almost immediately we realized that the best way to pay homage to the book was to not translate it. It was to distil, not illustrate it, to distil, from our opinion what we thought was the essence of the of the book. And then use that essence as through lines and then lean into all the things we know that cinema is capable of. Which is being visceral, being temporal in ways that are ineffable of being super sensorial. To shape the way that we see the world, and with that process, I realized after reading the book point-of-view was the first thing I thought of so that’s my starting point.

Joslyn and I began to take the same approach as we’d done with Hale County This Morning, This Evening which has these roving poetic images of life that have both narrative thrusts but more the feeling of this sort of epic banal. Adding that to the characters’ vocabulary: the visual vocabulary of how they’re seeing their worlds and making meanings through those camera angles and through that mode of looking was a way to write the film in a way that’s closer to how human beings experience life and less about the way that cinema writes narrative.

What a joy to make up images! To organize the camera’s movement in them to make meaning for the characters’ relationship to their context.

Nadine Whitney: I believe you’ve done that in a way that has contributed to a change in the poetics of cinema.

One of the things I didn’t see was the torturing of the Black body in an expanded manner. Can you tell me about making the choice not to show the extent of the torture and abuse on the human body? To avoid giving the subjective point of view to the person who is inflicting violence.

RaMell Ross: Yeah, you know, we know what those images look like, and they’ve had great social and cultural purpose, right? We needed to know for people that weren’t experiencing it themselves and we’re not in close relation to those who are what it looked like that they needed proof that they were happening.

We needed proof that they happened. We needed some historical recreation, just in order to visualize what is impossible to visualize because it’s so unbelievably inhumane to do, we have a hard time believing that someone would chain someone to a fence or a tree or hang someone or whip them until they died. At some point in time, we had to see them, because otherwise people have a hard time believing anything. But when we over index on those, when we overindulge in that visually, it does something else psychologically that I think we’re just now starting as a culture to understand has devastating effects.

Who deserves that violence? I think, with that being said, one has to ask at this point in time, given the proliferation of these images, who is it for? Like we knew before who it was for, it had a very clear it for people who did not know, but everyone knows now.

In the in the film, we don’t show it. If you ask yourself that question, you realize you don’t need to show it. You start to think otherwise, and thinking otherwise is way more interesting. It’s like, oh, actually, the moment of being hit by the whip, that’s just the beginning of the violence.

There’s a psychological violence that ripples across the cosmos of a person’s brain in perpetuity. There is trauma that becomes encoded in the world and in sound and in colors and in shadows. Also, if you take point of view as literal, as we did conceptually literal, you realize that in those moments of violence, no one is looking directly in the eyes of the evil, looking directly in the eyes of the perpetrator, directly at the wound itself, at the blood. They are coping in those moments. We tried to show how human beings would behave in a moment in which their being subjected to those horrors.

Nadine Whitney: And, as you said if you are showing the wound you’re showing the person who inflicted them. That’s their point of view.

RaMell Ross: Yeah. I like that observation. It’s true. We’re not focusing on the the system that enables it or the person that’s doing it. We are focusing on the victim, you know, and they’re the one that’s in the least control and the least responsible.

What a joy it is to have the film affecting you in Australia which is half of the earth away. We know that communities like the Black community, the American Indian community, and indigenous communities across the world have rarely represented themselves globally through the visual sphere. The ideas in Nickel Boys are making their ways through all of these continents and consciousnesses. It’s unbelievable.

Nadine Whitney: Thank you so much, RaMell. Keep making films. Keep being a genius. Keep changing the poetics of the image. Keep being a teacher, a philosopher, and a seed and seat of power.

After watching From Above, an intense short film directed, written, and starred by Nicolaj Kopernikus, I realized how powerful art is. Here, the main protagonist barely says a word, yet the short, which is qualified for the upcoming 2025 Oscars, left an emotional impact on me.

What follows is an insightful conversation with Nicolaj, delving into his creative process, his approach to portraying villains, and his vulnerability on screen. Enjoy!

Jaylan Salah: What compelled you to write, star in, and direct From Above? 

Nicolaj Kopernikus: Well, that’s a big question. I got inspired by a man who was standing in front of the supermarket [around the corner] every day. He stood there still and looked like he was homeless. And I wondered when I passed him daily; what if I looked at him from another perspective? As if watching him from above. I was curious about his background and his destiny. Why is he standing there?  

And then, I started writing this story about a guy who had a family but coincidentally got divorced and maybe had a mental breakdown as well. But the most important thing for me was to show how to observe people from another perspective [in the script]. Therefore, I wrote the movie, directed it, and played the [main] character myself because I was too embarrassed to ask —a professional actor— colleague to [take on the role] and cut all his hair off. [As I decided to play it], I thought, I know how to play this character because I’ve been an actor for 30 years. So why not do everything myself? 

Jaylan Salah: There are two layers. You have the emotional layer and the physical layer. There are emotionally intense scenes without talking, and then you have the physical alteration through hair and makeup to aid you. So, which of these tools helps you more as an actor? Your internal feelings and inner conflict or using the physicality of the role—the major changes you underwent— to elevate the performance?

Nicolaj Kopernikus: This is a really good question. The physical thing [in this film] involves him making the transition from a homeless guy to someone cutting all his hair off, putting on a suit, and changing physically. In this case, the difficulty [whether the physical or the emotional work] is a one-to-one thing. It’s like what you see is what you get. In the case of emotions, this is more of an inner work [for me] as an actor.

This is why this film is a 50/50 situation, meaning that I am playing the character emotionally (from an emotional place), but the gift is that you can see this change [physically]. And it’s quite a big transition. It was also fun to cut off my hair because I only had one shot. We had to make sure we got all the material because we couldn’t reshoot [a shaved head] scene, so that was quite fun.

Jaylan Salah: Did you always have the conscious decision for the character not to speak? In the present scenes, not a single word is said, but emotions are conveyed entirely through his facial expressions. Did you always know there would be no dialogue? And why did you decide that?

Nicolaj Kopernikus: You must be precise when you show a character in a film. You have to choose and pick. If you want to tell his background story and similar things, it takes many minutes. This is why I chose to make an opening scene that shows how special a character is. Imagine this father pulling all his clothes from the closet to create an art piece on the floor with his daughter, and the way the wife watches him shows how she’s tired of him. That’s why I wanted to portray a character who, in some ways, exhibits subtle signs of mental instability.

And when —8 years later— this character is homeless, he is no longer able to speak. And every time I tried to give myself a line of dialogue, it made me feel that it would take something away from the character. I wanted him to be [fully encapsulated] in his loneliness and homeless situation. He is speechless, and that means he lost [everything], even his voice. I believe that when you live alone, you can only talk to yourself. Not to mention that the homeless man who originally inspired me for this film never spoke as well. So, it made sense to me to deprive him of words. 

Jaylan Salah: There are very vulnerable scenes when you’re under the shower, and your eyes are only doing the talking. We see your moist eyes, but no tears are falling down your cheeks. How do you, as an actor, go through this vulnerability while protecting yourself in your head space? Or do you dive in head first without caring if it wears you down? 

Nicolaj Kopernikus: I just dive into it. I mean, acting is an exit. For me, the most wonderful thing about my job is that I can dig into emotions, feel them all, and jump in and out of them.

It is wonderful that this is our job because that [experimenting with emotions] is what we love when we act. But the hard part is to decide how much you are showing or holding back. It’s interesting when I watch movies with massively talented actors, and the thing that emotionally touches me is when I can see that the actor —through the character— is holding back [emotions] in a way. As soon as you burst them out, the feelings are out there, and you have to build them up again. 

This is why it’s fun to make short movies —they serve as a tiny window into a single emotion, a specific situation, or a focused plot crafted with precision. I like that.

Jaylan Salah: The short movie is like a slice of life, and the long feature is the whole universe. 

Nicolaj Kopernikus:  Exactly. And I’m personally interested in looking at life from different perspectives. Even if you are mad or sad, you sometimes have to let time pass so that after a while, when you look at [what happened] from above, you will find that it changed. I believe life could be easier if we look at it from above. Because when you see the whole picture, you deeply understand everything. This is obvious in the scene where he is making this piece of art out of plastic —a massive picture of his daughter when looked at from above, while at a close distance, it appears as a pile of plastic litter. It is an art piece but also a symbol of the film’s message. I believe that we sometimes look at homeless people as if they are pieces of plastic, garbage.. But if you look at them from another perspective —from above— you realize they’ve been living their lives like everyone else but lost something profound. It concerns me how we can be only two steps away from losing it all and ending up in their position. You can have two garages, two cars, a big house, a family, and a good job; then, all of a sudden, you get divorced, lose your job and your money, lose your friends and your family, and become homeless.

This is scary and yet something we have to be aware of and compassionate towards others who lost because we never know if someday we’re going to be like one of them. 

The key message I want to share is the importance of connecting with the homeless, talking to them, reaching out to them, and viewing their lives from an empathetic perspective.

Jaylan Salah: You play the villain in [the Danish procedural drama] The Killing, and you play a very vulnerable character here. Which is more fun for you as an actor to play? 

Nicolaj Kopernikus: Oh, to be honest, it’s enthralling to play the bad guy. Yeah. I don’t have words to explain why, but one thing I can tell you is that you have to always take good care of your character and defend him in a way. So even if he is the worst person on earth, you have to stand by him. This is what you call “showing mercy for the character,” and that’s the hard part of working with [villains]. But still, it’s more interesting than playing ‘Mr. Nice Guy’. However, I also love to play roles that are full of emotions because it’s a privilege to make a film that touches people. This is true.

Jaylan Salah: What was the most interesting scene for you to play and direct? 

Nicolaj Kopernikus: It was a thin line between not being too banal or too sentimental, especially in the ending scene when [father and daughter] are meeting each other. That was difficult. It was also hard to choose the music and imagine how the actors would hold each other. On the other hand, the way he reaches out to his daughter through an art piece made of plastic and how crazy this idea has been was also very important to me. It must be a very wild idea to contain his behavior as a character and also connect to the beginning when his daughter is eight years younger, and they are making an art piece together from clothes. 

Another important scene in the film is when the girl finds her boyfriend peeing in my face. Because the way the daughter looks in the father’s eyes [my eyes] is an important emotional moment.

It was a nice journey doing this film. Everybody was so cool about it, and even the child actress who played my daughter at a younger age truly impressed me with her talent. The scene when she was looking at our fight [me and her fictional mom] was so good. She portrayed it beautifully. The only problem would be having to go to the monitor to playback a scene and see what we’ve done since I’m acting and directing at the same time. Luckily, I had a very good DOP, Henrik Kristensen, who took good care of me during the shoot. 

However, in terms of the most difficult scene, it had to be the one where I cut all my hair on camera because we only had one shot. But after doing it —because it took a long time to shoot— I felt a surge of adrenaline, but, that was still quite nice.