Lithuania noms "Conversations" for Foreign Language Oscar

PanARMENIAN.Net - Lithuania's contender for best foreign language Oscar nomination is Conversations on Serious Topics, a minimalist 65-minute documentary featuring kids talking about the world, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The film, by documentary and short film director Giedre Beinoriute, is "without exterior action, props, landscapes or special effects," according to producers Vilnius-based Monoklis.

The main characters are children and teenagers with "a special ability to describe the surrounding world."

Through simple shots of children, including those with disabilities -- blind or deaf and dumb -- responding to questions such as: "If you were to draw divorce, what would you draw?" (Initial response from a little blond girl about 10 years of age: "My parents' divorce or in general?"), the director reveals intimate conversations with her subjects that picture today's world as "at times melancholic, at times comical, at times dramatic."

Intensely emotionally moving, the film raises questions about loneliness, love, God, the world and human relations.

"This film is an experiment. I wanted to film as little and as attentively as possible so that I wouldn't miss a single tiny detail of the body language," Beinoriute, 37, said in a statement.

"I refused to film any action on purpose to concentrate on this mysterious mind travel from one eyebrow to another, from chin to eye. You may notice how the idea is born and suddenly it goes back to its origins to ripen."