HISTORICAL DRAMA THE POET
Telling the true and unique story of Lithuanian partisans‘ betrayal.
In Lithuania even though WWII ended, during the second Soviet occupation the war was still raging on. It lasted at least another 10 years. This war is called partisan war, because numerous priests, students, grammar-school boys, teachers, former officers of independent Lithuania went out to fight against the Soviet occupants and their local collaborators. The occupants did not manage to destroy this opposition by force, so they resorted to other means. One of them – local collaborators’ integration into the midst of the partisans.
Our film will be telling just such a story of a “double-agent” – a talented poet, literati, kicked out from the Lithuanian SSR writer’s union for anti-Soviet literature, recruited by the KGB, to establish contact with the partisans. For this betrayal (paying for his sins) he was promised a return to the Soviet Lithuanian elite strata. But paradoxically, even when he was a Soviet agent, once he ended up in the forest, he managed to “forget himself” – he wrote great partisan poems, anti-Soviet satires, songs. Only later, caught once again by the KGB, one more time he agreed to betray those, who had now become his friends – the partisans.
Vytautas V. Landsbergis’s motivation
The script of The Poet was written based on a painful and paradoxical story, which happened in the lives of a famous writer and leader of partisans. These two characters will be reborn with the nicknames of Kipšas and Tauras. By the way, Tauras’s cinematographic biography is woven based on the lives of the famous partisan leaders – Dzūkas, Vanagas, Žemaitis – and historical fragments.
In the film The Poet it will be attempted to look up closely and to experience the talented and careerist post-war writer’s life, his decision and dilemmas – to go to the woods and die or to remain and become a famous Soviet writer. The film touches the phenomenon of creativity – a good writer is not necessarily all good, honourable and brave human being. In this sense, the famous poet of the period – is a particularly spacious character, a wide palette of human and demonic features is revealed within him. And one or other colour can be unexpectedly activated by the unpredictable post-war history, personal issues or even domestic coincidence.
Stylistical manner (and purpose) of the film – is to allow the audience to remain within the radically changing choices of the poet, who accompanied the post-war intellectuals and village people, idealists and conformists. The pastel psychological portrait of the controversial creator in the face of partisan battles, NKVD provocations and betrayal will allow for the understanding that it is not declarations of ideas, but decisions of a certain man that fill the pages of the historical chronicles. And it is by far not monochrome.
It is hoped, that exactly this, more personal space can reveal the post-war era to the international audiences as recognisable, universal drama of human passions, exaltations and falls.
The main duo of the film creators – director and writer Vytautas V. Landsbergis and director and screenwriter Giedrius Tamoševičius.
Vytautas has created six films about Lithuanian partisans, Tricolour was nominated for the Silver Crane Award (2014, Lithuania) as the best documentary of the year, and the last of his partisan films A Portrait of the Hawk was screened at 2019 Scanorama film festival and ended up amongst the top three most watched films at the Lithuanian film festival.