QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

This documentary begins with the plaintive notes of a piano playing the two contrapuntal lines that make up the musical composition Für Alina (1976), and with a textual quote from iconic film music composer Arvo Pärt, about the capacity of sound to kill or to do the very opposite, and the big distance between the two. This immediately introduces not only a tone of melancholy, even of lament, to Giedrė Žickytė’s documentary, but also the motif of dualism. Also, as will become clear, that piece of music is intimately related to the titular theatre scholar, intellectual and human rights activist Irena Veisaitė, despite having a different dedicatee. For Alina is Veisaitė’s daughter, who in her teens during the Seventies moved permanently away with her father to England, leaving Veisaitė in Lithuania to contemplate her love and loss – and Pärt, who was a personal friend of Veisaitė through her new husband the Estonian filmmaker Grigori Kromanov, captured in his piece the mother’s intense, nuanced aching.

Love and loss are key themes here, as are mothers and daughters, in a study whose own subject would also become an absence, dying (of Covid) in 2020 at the beginning of production, and so forcing Žickytė to conjure Veisaitė’s spirit largely from archival interviews (of which there are many). Born in 1928 in Kaunas, Veisaitė was a Lithuanian Jew who survived the ghetto and the Holocaust, losing her own beloved mother but then gaining a second one, the Catholic activist Stefanija Paliulytė-Ladigienė, who fostered and hid the teenaged Veisaitė during the Nazi Occupation and treated her like her own daughter – only herself to be sent to a gulag for nine years by the subsequent Soviet occupiers. The documentary’s English title derives from a touching episode between Veisaitė and her new mother that restored Veisaitė’s faith in human love and in her own value.

Veisaitė would go on to be, as narrator Toma Vaškevičiūtė puts it in her voiceover, “a professor of literature, theatre critic, creator of the Open Society [in Lithuania Foundation]. And simultaneously, much more than all of that”. Which is to say that she stayed in Lithuania even though it had animalised and abandoned her in childhood, and specialised in the literature of Germany even though that country had in wartime murdered her mother and set about extinguishing her entire race and religion. She was a living testament to horrific war crimes and the Holocaust, but also to the spirit of compassion and forgiveness, in keeping with her birth mother’s stated principle (restated on the last time they were together) that revenge should never be taken. In other words, Veisaitė contains contradictions, embodying the dualism of that quote from Pärt at the film’s beginning. This woman who had every right to hate and avenge instead chose love.

As the closing credits for A Goodnight Kiss roll, we see an interactive video installation created by the artist Jenny Kagan in 2019 in Sejny, Poland, when Veisaitė was presented with the Borderlander Award there. It shows a TV monitor with Veisaitė in profile on the left-hand side delivering aphorisms about art, life, suffering, freedom and grace. As viewers enter the room, and stand by a green screen, they appear on the television’s screen facing Veisaitė, as though she were addressing them directly. At the end of this sequence, we see the artist Kagan leading in the 92-year-old Veisaitė herself to see the piece. “Why am I twice?”, Veisaitė asks, confused by the duplication of her image. “Because this is you now, and this is you in the film”. Kagan explains, “so if you go away, you’re still there!”..

In a sense Kagan’s words serve as a comment on the documentary itself, which all at once brings the now deceased Veisaitė back to life, preserves her ideas, outlook and image, and artificially places us in apparent proximity with her. It feels like we too were part of the (recorded) conversation – even if, like any eulogy, it also reminds us of her distance, and of a world which repeated the same old mistakes in her presence, and is now the worse for her absence. It is left to us to fill in the space that she has vacated.

A Goodnight Kiss just premiered in the Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.