19/08/2024 - We met up with the Lithuanian director, whose second feature tells the story of two sisters trying to rebuild their lives after a terrible accident

(© Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press)

Drowning Dry [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laurynas Bareiša
film profile] by Laurynas Bareiša, which has celebrated its world premiere in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, is about the trauma of losing someone you love and the difficulty of rebuilding your life. We sat down with the director to discuss the origins of the movie, the way he directs his actors, and what dry drowning actually means.

Cineuropa: Your characters are trying to cope with trauma and the changing nature of memory. What interests you about this psychological and mental process? Is it related to your own experience?
Laurynas Bareiša: It stems from a personal experience, a choking accident with my son. It happened very fast, while we were having breakfast. At first, it looked like he was having an epileptic fit. When it happened, at that very moment, there was no time to think; I just reacted and tried to clear his throat, but it didn’t work. His face started to go blue, so I panicked and I realised that my mind split. One part of my brain was thinking: “I will have to call my wife, and explain what happened and that our kid is dead,” while the other part just acted. In the end, I succeeded in getting the thing out of his throat; it was a matter of seconds, and I eventually called the ambulance. The process of analysing what happened took a long time, and I coped by writing the film. Lukas, in the film, just acts, and the others just watch. That was what really happened to me – you are passive and active at the same time.

The characters seem to hide their pain inside. Do you believe that a lack of communication is something that concerns society as a whole?
When I started building the whole structure of the film, this condition of so-called dry drowning, which is the act of drowning when not underwater, but rather on the surface, came in. I began to see parallels between this condition and human relationships, when you live close to someone but still continue to feel lonely, to feel like you’re drowning. In society, we try to be good people, but deep down, we are aggressive towards ourselves. Why do we, humans, find it so hard to be honest with ourselves and other people? It’s all connected to the idea of suffocating, of dry drowning.

Even though it’s not the main topic of your movie, you often play with gender stereotypes. Is this intentional, and are the relationships between the two couples representative of Lithuanian society?
I think that playing specific gender roles also causes us to drown. I wanted to emphasise the stupidity of acting as a result of something you are not even comfortable with, like this over-masculinisation of the fighter [character]. There’s this inner conflict between what we really are and what society expects of us. We can clearly call it aggression. I think it’s very counterproductive, especially when we have the possibility to choose to live in a peaceful society, a society where everyone has their own space and can be whatever they want to be. I’m not preaching, because I’m aware of my own limitations, but I want to show what the reality is.

Your actors and actresses are impressive, as they are affectionate and cold at the same time. How did you work with them?
We really wanted to build a close group. We wanted there to be chemistry between them and for them to be a form of support for the child actors and actresses. They needed to know how to communicate with them. Three of them went to the same acting school, and they’d had similar experiences. It was important that the coldness you see on screen wouldn’t interfere with the process involving the children. In my previous films, I was able to go deep into the acting process, but here, with child actors and actresses around who didn’t get what we were working on, I had to keep everything light. It wasn’t easy, because I was also the cinematographer. With them, I had to pretend that we were not making a movie, so I felt a little like a serial killer pretending to be a school teacher.