Kristina Buožytė

Kristina Buožytė's master's degree diploma film The Collectress is about a young woman Gailė (Gabija Ryškuvienė) who lost her ability to feel the emotions after her father's death. In order to regain the feelings Gailė has to film the situations and watch them again. She starts to construct sexual situations, thus 'the collection' grows.[7] According to the film-maker, the idea for the screenplay came when searching for the reason why people react to emotions shown on the screen more intensively than to those in real life.[8] From its original plot itself to the visual depiction of the essential instincts, The Collectress was review as a Freudian, brave and controversial film which contributes a new and fresh piece in Lithuanian cinema.[9]

The film was warmly welcomed internationally: it was shown in more than 30 film festivals in Europe (Karlovy Vary, Pusan, Valencia Film Festival, Meinheim, Kinoshock (in Anapa, Russia), North Africa (Cairo Film Festival) and South America (São Paulo). Buožytė received The Best Film Award in Lithuanian Cinema and TV Awards Silver Crane (Sidabrinė gervė) and the Best Director Award at the Kinoshock film festival in Russia in 2008. The international success of the film-maker's debut opened possibilities for her further career.[10]

Buožytė's second feature film Vanishing Waves is about the emotionally remote scientist Lucas (Marius Jampolskis) who participates in neurological experiment where he successfully contacts a young comatose woman named Aurora (Jurga Jutaitė).[11] Lucas subconsciously communicates with Aurora's suppressed personality, breaks the rules and lies to the superiors about their relationship.[12] Because of the uncertain boundaries between dream and reality Vanishing Waves is often compared with Christopher Nolan’s Inception, except when Christopher Nolan's films are called sterile and sexless, Buožytė gives the audiences an immersive depiction of unconscious dreamworld as a surreal and explicit psychosexual smorgasbord that would make Freud blush.[13] Vanishing Waves is also compared to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut because of its soft-core sex scenes[14] and Tarkovsky's Solaris because of its symbolic titular planet.[15] Meanwhile the director points out that film explores the psychological aspects of the relationships - all the feelings, the attitudes, the sufferings and the pleasures begin in human's head, thus the main focus is on the egocentrism of the main character and its transformation during the experiences of desire, pleasure and love.[16] It is the first science fiction film made in Lithuania and the first Lithuanian film distributed in North America.

Vanishing Waves was named the Best European Fantasy Film in 2012 and received 21 other awards of which 15 went to Kristina Buožytė for her creative work as a screenwriter and director. Buožytė's films fulfilled with eroticism, philosophical searching, and visual splendor makes her new provocative and exited European talent and it deserves to be noticed by cinephiles around the world.[17]