The latest feature from the director of ‘You Am I,’ ‘Songs For a Fox’ has its world premiere in competition at the Warsaw Film Festival U.K.-French sales outfit Alief has snapped international rights outside the Baltics and Poland to “Dice-Ching-a-Mat“ from Lithuanian filmmaker Kristijonas Vildziunas, whose earlier works bowed in Venice (“The Lease”), Cannes Un Certain Regard (“You Am I”) and twice served as Lithuania’s Oscar bets (“Seneca’s Day,” “Songs for a Fox”). The feature was powered by Vildziunas’s regular partner Uljana Kim, one of Lithuania’s most esteemed producers, recipient of the prestigious Eurimages International Co-Production Award in 2023. The announcement was made on the eve of the Warsaw International Film Festival where the film bows in competition.
In a trailer shared with Variety, sci-fi blends with reality, with the main protagonist Vilis (seasoned actor Dainus Gavenonis from “Poetas,” “The Southern Chronicles”), stuck in a mysterious Cube, similar to an old Soviet elevator, asking for help to get out. In the claustrophobic space – a physical representation of Vilis’ mind, a voice in an intercom tells him that to reclaim his lost identity, he must exit through a red door and return by the green. In different sequences, he finds his way back to real life and to his family, affected by the pandemic.
As he learns to master the mechanism, he understands that he needs to get a grip of his life and reconnect with his three adult children and wife that he had emotionally abandoned. I don’t remember you as kids which makes me really sad,” he tells his children. Playing against Gavenonis are Vilma Raubaitė (“Toxic”), Adelė Šuminskaitė, Maksim Semionov and Vaidilė Juozaitytė.
It converges time travel with generational drama into a rewarding experience,” said Miguel Govea, partner at Alief which repped Vildziunas’ previous pic “Songs for a Fox.” “[The film is] for those interested in visually striking, emotionally engaging drama with a fantastical twist,” added Alief president Brett Walker. Unpacking the genesis of the film, Vildziunas said the idea grew out of his personal experience with COVID back in 2020, when the world suddenly shut down. And I understood that I wanted it back!
In the silence of that full stop, I realized that I did not know who I was anymore. So ‘Dice-Ching-o-Mat’ is based on that feeling,” he said. On the enigmatic title and meaning of the Cube, Vildziunas said, ”I felt that this story could not be horizontal, that it was impossible to tell it without a tangible reflection of the protagonist’s inner world, without showing how his mind works.” He set his focus on a scholar, devoted to “an extremely obscure subject” – the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching-but contrastingly unable to grasp his own life.
The writer-director then made his character’s saturated mind look like “an old Soviet lift, oddly intermingled with the symbolism of a game based on the I Ching.” “The title is derived from all of that,” said Vildziunas. So we took a risk and filmed them quite differently, using different lenses, compositions, mise-en-scène and colours.” Quizzed on the biggest challenge on a production standpoint, Kim cited the building of the Cube, an elevator-like set. The film was produced by Lithuania’s Studio Uljana Kim, in co-production with Latvia’s Studio Locomotive, Estonia’s Filmivabrik and Poland’s Documentary and Feature Film Studios (WFDiF), with support from the Lithuanian Film Centre, the National Film Centre of Latvia, the Estonian Film Institute, Estonian Cultural Endowment, Lithuanian National Radio and Television and Vilnius Film Fund.Distribution in the co-production territories is set for 2027.
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