Bartas: Time of Utopia Will Never Come (Yaroslav Vasiutkevych)
I've invited Yaroslav Vasiutkevych to introduce us to another book of his, about Šarūnas Bartas: Yaroslav Vasiutkevych writes : Šarūnas Bartas: Time of Utopia Will Never Come (2026) This book has a very specific point of departure. In 2016, in Kyiv, I interviewed Šarūnas Bartas while he was preparing to work on the film Frost . By that time, I had already seen his early films, which made a strong impression on me precisely as captured time. In those works, there is a record of a vast historical rupture, the collapse and death of the Soviet empire, not as an event explained retrospectively, but as a condition directly experienced by people, spaces, and reality itself. I wrote the first two texts on Bartas’s cinema at that time, while preparing for our meeting. Years later, when I returned to them, I not only saw Bartas differently. The historical context in which his films are perceived had also changed. For that reason, I deliberately chose not to rewrite those early texts complet...