Before Flying Back to Earth

The documentary was filmed in a children’s hospital in Vilnius. The camera stays in the leukaemia ward. It follows the children being treated there. Their games, their talk and their ordinary days are all in it. The film does not enlarge the suffering. It does not reach for easy feeling either. The telling is calm and sparing with words. Some critics compared it to haiku. The director’s own daughter had fought the same illness years before. She recovered, and the film was made afterwards. That fact sits behind the whole thing. The film won prizes in Amsterdam and in Leipzig. It also took the documentary award of the Directors Guild of America. The fifty two minute documentary is a German and Lithuanian co-production Arūnas Matelis finished in 2005.