News

Reel Suspects has acquired world rights to Marat Sargsyan’s feature debut “The Flood Won’t Come” which will have its world premiere at Venice in the Critics’ Week section.

Produced by Ieva Norvilienė at Tremora, “The Flood Won’t Come” revolves around a famous colonel who has acted as a war consultant in different countries for many years and returns to his homeland when a civil war breaks out.

The movie is headlined by popular Lithuanian actors Valentinas Masalskis and Remigijus Vilkaitis. The lithuanian drama “Sargsyan” marks the feature debut of Sargsyan, who previously directed the short film “Lernavan” in 2009.

Reel Suspects’ slate also includes “Une Dernière Fois” (“One Last Time”), the debut feature of Olympe de G, a well-known French director of commercials and music videos; as well as Maximiliano Contenti’s Uruguyan horror movie “Al Morir La Matinée,” and Anthony Scott Burns’s Canadian science fiction thriller “Come True.

In the late 1930s, prior to emigrating to the United States, Lithuanian geographer Kazys Pakstas proposed a radical solution to what he saw as the inevitable eradication of the nation through its assimilation into the German and Russian spheres of influence: The purchase and annexation of a large tract of land on the African or American continent, and the creation there of a “backup Lithuania.” Eighty years later, filmmaker Karolis Kaupinis has taken this eccentric idea as the kernel of truth from which his beautifully poker-faced feature debut can sprout into an elegant, offbeat fiction that is both steeped in pre-war Lithuanian history and starkly relevant to our current moment — wherever nationalism is being invoked for political capital by powerful cowards. Which is to say: almost everywhere.

In appropriate 4:3 ratio (boxed in on either side like the beleaguered nation it examines), and in crisp black-and-white, ‘Nova Lituania’ opens with little context or hand-holding.