After a lengthy tour which recently took her to Tilburg, Thessaloniki and New York, Lithuanian director Austėja Urbaitė stopped off in Lecce for the 24th European Film Festival, armed with her first feature film Remember to Blink [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Austėja Urbaitė
fiche film], which starts out with a French couple adopting two Lithuanian children before turning into a high-tension duel between the adoptive mother and the Lithuanian girl they welcome into their home as an interpreter and translator. We spoke about the movie with Urbaitė, who also penned the screenplay.

Cineuropa: How did the idea come about for this confrontation between two women and two kinds of motherhood?
Austėja Urbaitė: It’s an idea I got from travelling and encountering similar situations with adoption. I've been working with kids since I was 13, when I worked as a children’s activity leader, so I’ve always had a very strong connection and relationship with kids. Then I got to meet kids from an adoptive family where there's a completely different mindset, which I didn't know how to respond or react to. I couldn't read them. It felt like another universe to me, and it was painful but also interesting. International adoption makes you wonder how difficult it is to leave your country. At certain points in time I felt myself really judging someone else's parenting and asking why this person would want to adopt. I didn't understand their behaviour. Why would you need a child if you’re so cold? So I realised I knew nothing about all of that. There are so many ways to love and to show love: you might not be tactile or a hugger, but it doesn't mean that a mother doesn't know how to love.

The film also seems to explore clashes between different cultures and countries. Was this your intention?
For me, it was all about misunderstandings between people, regardless of cultures. A situation like this might arise between any two countries, purely because they’re different, or within the same country even. It’s about looking at things from the other side. It's an example of how people only understand and judge situations from their own perspective, based on how they were brought up, what their surroundings were, their culture, their habits. So yes, different cultures do make this worse. But it's the same thing that happens between a husband and wife. So it was just a broader spectrum for analysing the issue of us not seeing where other people are coming from or what their background is. It could be two people, two races, two genders; using two countries was just a premise for analysing human behaviour.

Why did you choose a French couple as your protagonists?
Because I speak French and I have a long-lasting love for France. I’ve travelled around in the country, I got to know the culture, I loved the art, I had friends there. I’d also experienced people looking down on me, as if they were superior to me, so I knew what that was like. I felt like I had enough personal experience to paint an authentic portrait of a country which wasn’t copied from a movie or a book, and I wanted these two different countries to be portrayed as equals. I knew where the clashes would take place.

Nature has a strong presence in the film: every so often, the focus switches to snakes, insects… What is its relationship to the film’s characters?
I definitely saw nature as a big part of the characters’ emotional worlds, it seems to reflect people's emotions. And I based the whole concept for the movie on nature. I imagined everybody as animals and tried to create a shared habitat for them. And I really wanted the house to be totally isolated from any other exterior world, so that the characters would be trapped together with their competing egos and outlooks. They wouldn't have anyone else there to say: “Hey, stop, take a step back” or “Look, maybe that’s not actually what she’s doing”. In reality, there isn’t anyone who can open their eyes for them if they don't do it for themselves. I always saw Jacqueline as the mountain and as stable ground, while Gabriele is chaotic and changeable, like water. The film is about perspectives: where you stand and what you see. That’s why nature is always a counterpoint too: the huge, forcefulness of nature compared with a tiny human, and then a human compared to a little bug or insect.

The film shows repeated news coverage of forest fires. Why is this?
I get the feeling that if enough people feel the same things at the same time, enough energy could be released to make something happen in this world. So it's more that I wanted to show human rage and aggressiveness building up in nature and even associating it with raging fires. I like to use fire or other natural phenomena to convey the moods and feelings between or inside my characters.

What does the film’s title, Remember to Blink, refer to, exactly?
When you stop blinking, you’re in some sort of dream state, a kind of tunnel where you can’t actually see what’s going on, and that’s exactly what happens to the characters. It’s also about perspective and perception: if you only see good in what you're doing and only see bad in what others do, you're probably not seeing the whole picture. So when looking at yourself and others, you should blink and try to see the bigger picture, before making any decisions or judgements.