Three Days

Bartas’s first full-length feature was modeled on romantic films. In search of erotic adventures, two young Lithuanians leave their village home and head to the big city, played by post-Soviet Kaliningrad in winter. They meet some young Russian girls at a seaside square and then spend three days with them, silently hanging out in the streets, trying to get a room at a hotel for workers, and observing life in an apartment building packed with people. Bartas avoids all manner of attractions, dialog, and cause-and-effect relationships. The action in the film is made up of long periods of waiting for something that, if it even comes, is hidden in conjecture, replaced by an ellipsis. The painterly composition of each frame was thought through right down to the tiniest detail, the colors reduced to a minimum, and the world represented was constructed with the addition of sound, which plays a creative role. The film stars, among others, Bartas’s muse, Katerina Golubeva—who would later appear in films by Leos Carax, Claire Denis, and Bruno Dumont—and Audrius Stonys, one of the directors from Kinema.