Just like in his successful feature debut, Nova Lituania [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Karolis Kaupinis
scheda film], for his sophomore effort, Hunger Strike Breakfast, Karolis Kaupinis again picks up a peculiar event from his country’s history and retells it through the highly subjective gaze of a character: in the former, it was a geographer who came up with the eccentric idea of creating a “backup Lithuania” in a faraway territory when its independence was threatened; in the latter, it’s a desperate TV presenter trying to regain her job and workplace as Russian soldiers occupy the locally governed TV channel in Vilnius in 1991, in an attempt to stop the inevitable withdrawal of Soviet control.

Both films explore small, private battles for Lithuanian sovereignty, and what makes them appealing is that, despite their clearly political origins, their perspective on the events is deeply human – focused on the mundanity that often remains off screen when “big history” unfolds. Furthermore, unlike the stylised, black-and-white Nova Lituania, Hunger Strike Breakfast – which has just premiered in the 1-2 Competition of the 41st Warsaw Film Festival – is shot in a cinéma vérité fashion, offering a curious glimpse into the everyday realities of the early days of Lithuania’s post-communist freedom. And in its atmospheric approach, it joins what seems to be a tendency in Lithuanian cinema lately, also manifested in the recent local hit The Southern Chronicles [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Ignas Miškinis
scheda film]: capturing the spirit of an epoch and building time capsules as if to preserve not-yet-faded memories, a result that proves far more engaging than direct political commentary.

The protagonist of Hunger Strike Breakfast is TV presenter Daiva (Ineta Stasiulytė) – a loner with little to lose, who is therefore quick to take to the streets when Russian forces occupy the Lithuanian Radio and Television headquarters – in fact, the only building affected during the Soviet Union’s last-ditch attempt in 1991 to regain power before its definitive collapse. Reluctantly joined by her hesitant boss Mykolas (Arvydas Dapšys), who tries to stay out of trouble in any given situation, and a more rebel-spirited but rather quiet colleague from the radio, Daiva stages a petit comité protest in a trailer that eventually turns into a hunger strike, caught between the aloof soldiers on one side and the apathetic neighbours on the other. Marginalised stage actor Sigis (Paulius Pinigis) joins their small group as well – at first annoyed that they’re waking his baby with their megaphone appeals, he soon seizes upon the protest as an outlet for family tensions and a stage upon which to display his dramatic flair in an improvised psycho-drama of personal confessions. As their offensive attracts little attention and their hunger triggers survival mode, the small sit-in quickly fizzles out, ingloriously, forcing them to obey their bodies’ impulses amidst overall indifference.

With the plot’s outcome already shaped by the preordained course of history, the film’s focus is on the people’s private reality, and hence intimate conversations in the trailer and the kitchen in a nearby flat take precedence over the grand political speeches. The Russian-speaking neighbour and a dissident from the Lithuanian Liberty League enrich the portrait of a fractured society teetering between two eras, while Daiva’s weary expression and Mikolas’s dysfunctional family convey the collective fatigue at the status quo and the yearning for change. In this sense, Kaupinis comes up with a non-heroic portrait of a political shift, in which the epoch is rendered through stories of personal failures, loneliness and alienation, while the broader changes of this particular time period serve more as a backdrop.

Hunger Strike Breakfast was produced by Lithuania’s M-Films in co-production with the Czech Republic’s Background Films and Latvia’s Tasse Film.