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Set around the planning of the first LGBTQ march in Kaunas, Lithuania, one of the country’s top activists, Deividas (Elvinas Juodkazis), is assassinated. The Activist isn’t really about him though; instead, it’s about the grief, trauma, mystery, hatred, and the activism his demise provokes. Deividas worked for Rainbow Kaunas, and his co-workers debate how to maintain the safety of the protestors after his death. His boyfriend Andrius, played by Robertas Petraitis of Southern Chronicles (Ignas Miskinis, 2024) fame, finds the body in their shared apartment and hears the killer fleeing. The cops don’t care too much, so Andrius takes matters into his own hands and infiltrates an anti-queer and pro-violence neo-Nazi group. Are there any other kinds of skinheads after all?
The Activist, Romas Zabarauskas’s fifth feature film, and the final one in his queer trilogy (after 2020’s The Lawyer and 2023’s The Writer) stitches together many tones. It can be tender. It can be classically dramatic. It can be sexy. And it can be thrilling. The first few scenes embody this richly. Deividas joins the interior minister at a tense pro-LGBTQ political event that ends in less-than-peaceful protest. With no allies or supporters in sight, only anti-love bigots show up for the joint speech and announcement of the upcoming march—one of the film’s more puzzling writing decisions. Handheld cinematography fills the event with the potential to go wrong at any moment: Is this when he gets assassinated? Who will do it? How? Things quickly turn to an intimate, lovely scene between Deividas and Andrius. The soundtrack changes from anxious-music to the ambient sounds of their apartment. The cinematography, no longer the restless roaming camera of before, now feels warmer and more settled—homely even.
Queers of all sorts run the show in The Activist. Jonas (Simas Kuliesius), a man who happens to be trans, helps Andrius through his loss and offers a shoulder to lean on. He also helps Andrius “man up” to fit in with the neo-Nazis. It’s difficult to think of another time in cinema when a cis-man asks a trans-man to help navigate masculinity. For this interesting dynamic alone, Zabarauskas’s third film in his political-queer trilogy is worth seeing.
The screenplay — a three-way collaboration between Zabarauskas, Vitalija Lapina, and Marc David Jacobs — doesn’t stop the gayness with the assassinated activist, his boyfriend, and their trans-friend. A lesbian forsakes her political allegiances, a gay man becomes a backstabber, and a bisexual woman does a whole lot of nothing. Zabarauskas, an openly gay Lithuanian man himself, also shines light on nuanced aspects of the queer experience. Same-sex attracted men hesitantly approach public locker room showers and, contrary to Western gendered texting norms, do not shy from using emojis in their texts. It’s just like the real world!
And that matters. Same sex marriage remains constitutionally prohibited in Lithuania and until April 2025 even civil partnerships weren’t possible. Pro-LGBTQ opinions in Lithuania are among the lowest in the European Union, and a study released by the Pew Research Center in 2017 found that 69% of Lithuanians think “homosexuality should not be accepted by society.” Things have changed for the positive since 2017, but the climb upwards remains steep for non-heteronormative individuals in Lithuania. For The Activist to so thoroughly show so many different queer embodiments of humanity, in this challenging context, is itself politically striking and commendable.
That said, in a quintessentially queer fashion, things get complicated. The three different hands involved in the screenplay open a few too many threads for The Activist to solve. The largest of these is with Laima (Tekle Baroti), the lesbian former worker at Rainbow Kaunas and ex-lover of a pre-transition Jonas. Rejected by Jonas once more, she pivots to the political right and makes unironic friends with the same skinheads Andrius infiltrates. She moves so quickly to borderline Nazism that it’s unbelievable, especially for an unapologetic lesbian. Her flame for Jonas also goes unchallenged. Men do nothing for her arousal, but Jonas, whom Laima once loved as a person assigned female at birth, still turns her on. That is a genuinely interesting sexual predicament that the script chooses to only hint at rather than fully explore.
The Activist just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
