There are films that are difficult to talk about without feeling a sense of inadequacy towards what they address, films that are so intimate, whose author bares all as they rework events from their own lives that are so tragic that any analysis or comment seems superfluous. One such film is Laguna [+lee también:
entrevista: Šarūnas Bartas
ficha de la película] by Šarūnas Bartas, in which the beloved Lithuanian director processes a devastating loss – that of his oldest daughter Ina Marija, who disappeared too soon and suddenly – by returning to the places that she loved and where she lived before getting killed in a terrible accident.

In the film, presented as a Special Event at the 22nd Giornate degli Autori in Venice, the director of Frost [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Sharunas Bartas
ficha de la película] (Lithuanian candidate at the 2017 Oscars) and In the Dusk [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Sharunas Bartas
ficha de la película] (2020), both selected in Cannes, makes that journey with his youngest daughter, Una, in a village on the Pacific coast of Mexico, immersing himself in an uncontaminated, primitive landscape – an area lashed by hurricanes, but where nature shows extraordinary resistance and a capacity for rebirth, a landscape in which the young Ina Marija loved to immerse herself when she moved there to act in a film. Bartas’s off-screen voice tells us about her, then a long silence follows while the camera captures the laguna, the mangroves, a sea turtle leaving her eggs on the beach. One gets the impression that the director wants to make us see and breathe what her daughter saw and breathed, including the people in that place, their life stories, their simple daily routine.

Then there are the conversations between Bartas and his youngest daughter, in front of the fire, moments of great tenderness and reflection, of laughter and tears, where the camera stops on the face of this luminous child, on her subtle changes of expression when she wonders where dead people go. “We don’t know how it will end, and that’s what makes life interesting”, her father tells her. But some people die too soon, and the only way to keep them alive is to remember them. Bartas chooses to share his memory with the audience, and without following a traditional narrative line but rather proceeding by sensory, evocative fragments, he lets the spectator slowly build their own film and take from it what they want. “I didn’t believe a hurricane was so powerful until I found myself in one”, he says, and he doesn’t seem to be solely referring to the atmospheric event. What is also powerful, for whoever watches this film, is to witness this father who, despite the suffering he carries, carved in every trait of his face, faces pain and loss head-on, and who softly guides his daughter to do the same, inviting her not to cry because Ina Marija isn’t here anymore, but rather to be grateful that Ina Marija once was.

Laguna was produced by Lithuanian outfit Studija Kinema with French company KinoElektron, and co-produced by so-cle and Arte France Cinéma. International sales are handled by Shellac.