A new visual identity, a festive opening weekend at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre (LNDT), this year's festival image created by Tomas Ramanauskas and voiced by Rasa Samuolytė – "Cinema spring" is intensively preparing for its anniversary. From March 7 to 23, the Vilnius City Film Festival will once again invite viewers to a grand film celebration, which will feature not only special auteur films, but also other film events.
"Like in that song - you open your eyes and see", "It reminds me of a hamburger!", "First impression - no, this is corporate. Second impression - yes, it's simple, flexible and open", "Everyday life covers my eyes, cinema opens” – last week, “Kino pavasaris” gently teased fans by sharing the impressions of the festival’s friends and partners about the new logo, but without showing it. Comments flooded Facebook, the festival team received personal requests to secretly share the logo in advance, the never-before-seen visual identity was already being talked about in private circles of acquaintances, and today “Kino pavasaris” is finally revealing it.
A film discovery platform with surprises all year round
Daiva Visockytė, Head of Communications and Marketing at Kino Pavasaris, says that Kino Pavasaris is already more than a festival, so it's time to portray and put it into words: Kino Pavasaris has lived, spread and grown organically for 30 years, that is, without any major strategies or positioning itself. However, having grown to such a large-scale event and having film distribution, screening and other activities alongside it, there was a need to incorporate all of this into a confident and mature cultural brand that has finally found its identity. And when, if not after its 30th anniversary, is there a better opportunity to mark its maturity? Therefore, I invite you to accept the new identity as a stage of maturity, as an ambition to grow even more, to encompass even more activities, of which the festival is only the most visible tip of the iceberg," she says.
The new identity of Kino pavasaris was created together with Synthesis Consulting Group strategists Marija Bliuvaite, Gediminas Užkuraitis and art director Domas Mikšias. M. Bliuvaite says that after welcoming the Lithuanian spring with good cinema for many years, the majority of people have already begun to perceive the Kino pavasaris brand as a broader cultural phenomenon with a close-knit community and high-quality content, so they wanted to finally free it from its original form and present it in a consistent role of national cinema leadership.
"With the new strategy and design, we encoded an idea that, it seems, we all already knew, but we just hadn't said it out loud yet: "Kino pavasaris" is a platform for creators, viewers, critics and partners, providing an opportunity to constantly enjoy and exchange the fruits of world-class cinema. Cinema that teaches you to prepare yourself for new experiences, open up to sensitive topics, question accepted attitudes, identify with love subjects or choose a political camp," she notes.
The image of the 30th festival – in the hands of T. Ramanauskas and on the lips of R. Samuolytė
“If you don’t want to go crazy, you have to experience auteur cinema in a movie theater. Because in a movie theater, everything that is insignificant is obscured. <…> your fingers stop tingling, your gaze focuses, your inner voice calms down and you become a passenger. And it’s good to be a passenger. You’re being driven. You’re being told a story. Focus on it,” says actress R. Samuolytė as the dark screen lights up.
T. Ramanauskas, the advertising designer who created this year's "Kino pavasaris" image campaign, believes that there is only one cultural event in Lithuania that lasts so long, maintains such consistent quality, and exhibits foreign colors (and sometimes ourselves) so comprehensively. event, whose phenomenon has been going on for 30 years.
"There is nothing even close to what "Kino pavasaris" managed to create and maintain. It has been a space for 30 years. Several generations have touched it. How Lithuania has changed during that time! This is an incomparable cultural mark. "Kino pavasaris" accustomed us to the relevance of cinema (it would be hard to believe in what a new, auteur cinema poverty we once lived in), the courage of creators, the importance of spectacle. It became a more worthy sign of selecting good films than any awards we know. "Kino pavasaris" spread on the big screen, with all its importance, publicly and with its head held high," he says.
It is for these reasons, according to T. Ramanauskas, that this year's campaign is about the uniqueness of watching an auteur film in a cinema, which was intentionally abandoned to convey images and left only black screens and titles and the lively voice of R. Samuolytė. "In each format, we tried to find our own arguments to come to the cinema, and for those who have come, to highlight why it is worth feeling better," says the creator.
Festive opening weekend at LNDT: musical performances and a film opening the first "Cinema Spring"
The first weekend of the anniversary festival, March 7–9, will see exclusive screenings at the LNDT, where viewers will be able to see the very first film shown at the first "Cinema Spring" - Leo Carax's "Pont Neuf Lovers" (Lovers On The BridgeThe festival will be opened by the drama "The Flood" by Latvian director Gintas Zilbalodis, which was nominated for two Oscars last week and has already been awarded the European Film Academy Award and the first Golden Globe for best animation in the Baltic States.Flow).
Some LNDT screenings will be accompanied by live sound effects, which viewers have come to love. Among them is French filmmaker Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), for which a specially created soundtrack will be performed by Jozef van Wissem, the composer of Jim Jarmusch's film "Only the Loving Survive", who was awarded the "Palme d'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival. Also, the chilling, radically expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" by German director Robert Wiene, one of the pioneers of the horror genre (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), for which the psychedelic rock band "Garbanotas" will create the musical background. And internationally recognized producer and co-founder of "Radio Vilnius" Manfredas Bajelis and drummer Marijus Aleksa, with their joint project "Santaka", will provide the soundtrack for one of the most radical experiments in Japanese cinema history - Teinosuke Kinugasa's film "Page of Madness" (A Page of Madness). Viewers can purchase tickets for some LNDT screenings today.
The screenings of "Kino pavasaris" at the LNDT can be found here: https://kinopavasaris.lt/programa/, the full program will be announced on February 13. The 30th Vilnius City Film Festival "Kino pavasaris" will take place on March 7–23. The festival is supported by major partners "ERGO" and "Telia Play", and is partially financed by the Lithuanian Film Centre, Vilnius city municipality, "Creative Europe" MEDIA.
