The most prolific filmmaker in the Baltics has returned. Šarūnas Bartas, the director behind The House and Peace to Us in Our Dreams, has been on a break since 2019. Bartas has stayed busy since 1990, even if he is known to occasionally go on streaks of four or five years without adding to his world-class filmography. This break is more understandable than most, though. In 2021, his daughter, Ina Marija Bartaitė, was tragically killed by a drunk driver while riding her bicycle. She was only in her 20s. Ina Marija followed in the footsteps of both Bartas and her mother, Russian actress Yekaterina Golubeva, and was a filmmaker herself. Bartas has two new films this year, Back to the Family and Laguna, and they both carry his reflective sensibilities forward as they philosophically meditate around family trauma and grief. Laguna documents the director and his younger daughter on a deeply personal excavation of grief and a celebration of life in the face of Ina Marija’s loss while retracing the steps of the departed in Mexico.
Ina Marija moved to Mexico’s Ventanilla Lagoon to act in a film and found solace in the Pacific Mexican coastline. Her home away from her Lithuanian home was special to her, and this memory recovery journey is the reason for Šarūnas’ (sometimes transliterated as Sharunas) latest. Some of the most tender scenes anywhere in film this year are Šarūnas and his younger daughter, Una Marija, remembering Ina Marija around small campfires in a remote Mexican forest. These discussions are simple but almost philosophical, covering topics such as life after death, grief and life celebrations, and moving on. Laguna is a heartbreaking film — for viewers going in ignorant of the context, it will be doubly so once they realize it’s a documentary — but it’s also life-giving. To hear the crying father-director explain to his younger and grieving daughter that “it would’ve been worse if we never had her” is an emotion so unadulterated and touching it would be impossible to script. Even a world-class director can’t manufacture the kind of core memories that these may end up being for Una Marija.
The foreign and transplanted setting makes an excellent container for the familial reflection and the enormous emotions that are both repressed and released. What originally brought Ina Marija to this land in the first place was to make a film, we are told, an anecdote that reminds us of its fantastical location and how deeply the roots of filmmaking anchor this family. Only a film can shake out this complexity. Maybe this is what pulled Shakspeare to his “undiscovered country” metaphor: the intentionally exotic foreignness here, amplified by the guttural contradictions of hearing Lithuanian with a jungle in the backdrop, special and surreal at the same time like a dreamspace, as if Ina Marija is somehow actually present in some inexplicable way.
But the whole movie isn’t spent in direct father-daughter mourning. The pair retrace Ina Marija’s footsteps and do a few things in memory of their departed. Bartas also dedicates a lot of screentime to animals: a sea turtle, an alligator, cattle, an iguana, birds, and any number of creepy crawlies. An extended sequence of the turtle struggling to rest in the sand before heading to the sea is one of the film’s longer scenes. The point is clear: these animals too share in the fullness of life. There is no indication of where any of these animals are on the food chain, no violence to be found here. They also implicitly return the premise of Ina Marija’s untimely death back to the wondrous gift of life through the depiction of the natural life cycle.
Though he is lesser known than Béla Tarr or Aki Kaurismäki, Šarūnas Bartas is cut from the same cloth of pensiveness, melancholy, and minimalist dialogue. Words do not come in abundance in his films, and Laguna makes no effort to change that. The words spoken, though, weigh mightily; Šarūnas and Una Marija aren’t just processing their grief — they are creating an epistemology of loss together. The mysteries of nightfall in a country not their own and the ambient sounds of the insect-filled wilderness surrounding them make their loss feel both miniscule and as if it were the most important thing in the world. The choice of title, recalling a deep and almost oppressive body of water, reiterates this work of meaning-making. Grief can be foreboding like a lagoon; it can simultaneously and contrapuntally be a site for a baptismal-like transformation. Laguna understands this.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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