Interview with Arūnas Matelis: The Lessons of Angels
The film Before Flying Back to the Earth has won a Golden Dove of the 48th 
Festival DOC
The film has been shot in the Children’s Hospital in Santariškės,
I knew what the film was about and I was afraid. Yet when I started watching it – from the first sequence when a boy has his hair shaved off and he smiles – I understood that making us feel pity was not your purpose. You would neither play on our nerves nor tear our hearts. How did you manage this? Perhaps, this was also the way for you to protect yourself from being torn apart?
There is a stereotype: when you step into a hospital, you lower your head and prepare yourself for pity. And my experience tells me that nothing ends when you step over that threshold. On the contrary, many things only start there. Of course, there is no reason to shout ‘hurrah’ and be happy that you happen to be there, but this is definitely not the end.
Basically, there is no end there that you would have to mourn. Yes, there is pain, there is the uncertainty, and there is bereavement there. But this is not the last stop. On the contrary, people try to cling to life. Unless this has not been expressed very clearly in the film.
It is very clear. And the people in the film – parents, children, doctors – are different from those we meet every day. Something has been given to them for being there. To smile in the most unexpected place! Is there any story related to the title of the film, Before Flying Back to the Earth?
The most stupid thing for a filmmaker is to explain meanings. All right.
I needed a feeling that the place we see in the film is not here. Not on the Earth. A monastery – not a monastery, but something bright between Heaven and Earth. This is the meaning: we hope that everybody will come back from there, back to the Earth, but now is the time before that flight. After all that, all you are left with is to fly either there or there. A film about life between there and there. Between Heaven and Earth.
Do you call the children who are ‘between there and there’ angels?
This is what they seem to be to me. They all are like the anointed, like angels, even without gender. You cannot distinguish a girl from a boy. When a bald child watches a video greeting, in which a girl with plaits says that she is “missing you,” this sounds like a declaration of love. And, to tell the truth, it is not important whether that girl from the Earth speaks to a girl or to a boy. She misses the one who has to fly back.
Have the parents of the angels seen the film?
Yes, they have. And the children have seen it. We organised a screening: only to parents, children and doctors – in a cinema. Still in Lietuva. Their reactions were much unexpected. After all, sadly, some children are no longer here. Their parents told that this film was like the end of mourning for them. They even laughed watching the film. And doctors cried. They cried so much that they could not speak after the screening. The head of the department apologised all parents for medicine which was still unable to help everyone.
I told the parents: if you prefer, I can abstain from showing this film in . Because how can we know how people feel? Perhaps, they don’t want to be recognised. If at least one of them wanted that, I would not show it. They said we had definitely to show it. Because people have to know how it is over there. There are various initiatives; people are asked to donate money. People have to know what it is for. And not only because of that.
To me, those reactions after the screening are equal both to the Golden Dove of Leipzig and to the European Film Academy Documentary nomination. Perhaps, even more important than all awards and nominations.
I know that you used to leave the camera for children. How did you come up with this idea?
When I look through my notes for the script now, I understand that this has been somehow planned. It has been quite a while since I have wanted to see how filming would look like from the other side. You finish filming and what happens when you are no longer there? Because when you film, it is one story, and a completely different story is happening next to it. In reality it was like this: we would to come to the hospital to the children and we did not film them for a long time. We simply used to come. For a month or longer. We needed to understand if we could be there at all. Perhaps, I was the only one who could, and the rest of the crew couldn’t? Our video camera was like the most interesting toy for the children. A thing that helps to start a relationship. For us, with them, and for them, with us.
If we were magicians, we would have left tools which we had used for our tricks – so that they could try them out, see what they can do. The camera became a segment of our communication: children could play, cheer up or give meaning to their presence there.
You have inserted scenes filmed by children. Can you tell us now which ones are by children?
Scenes with Andrius where he tells what medicine he has to take and how much of it he has left. That mum is leaving the hospital and his sister will replace her. Most shots are by Andrius. Not so many by other children.
Andrius is the boy who smiles at the beginning of the film and as if invites to enter the film without fear? And the episodes where a child is romping in the corridor: stands on one leg or tries to get under a stick and then chops it in the ‘oriental’ way: have they also been filmed by children?
No, these are ours. We have consciously filmed from lower vantage points so that it would become impossible to detect which story has been seen by us, and which one, by children. There were situations when a child was filming and then we would take the camera from him and film the same. The camera was like a tool of anthropological research, uniting all of us.
Let us remember the time when only an idea for this film existed. Where did you propose it; what were the reactions then? I am asking because there are many documentary films about children with oncological diseases in the world. Did you receive any remarks then?
This film has emerged in a slightly non-traditional way. The Discovery channel in had included my Radio Days into the list of its projects. We used to meet in
I had been thinking about children in the oncological hospital for quite a while; I had written a draft script, but I thought it was a very personal thing and even didn’t know if I would ever venture into this. I came to one of the meetings with Discovery and showed my notes to the editor with whom we worked on Radio Days.
She said: “That’s it; leave other work and do this.” How, I said, Discovery is such a channel, such a vastness of interests, and this is just a simple hospital in
For pitching in 
Danes gave the money; Zentropa with Lars von Trier emerged; they fell out with some producers… In short, there was interest in the film and willingness to support it immediately, but then everything started to get confused. The editor of one TV channel left to work elsewhere; the new editor stopped all the projects; Danes fell out with Germans because they did not find out where post-production would take place… Everybody supported, everybody quarrelled and in reality I didn’t have anything.
Then I told my producer Gerd Haag that I would not wait any longer because I had been with that script, with that material, long enough and wanted to return to my theme; I returned, experienced that story and that’s it; let’s finish with it. After a week, my producer said, “let’s not finish: there is ARTE, there is ZDF; we can start working”.
And in general, pitching is a nightmare. You don’t speak English very well; you are nervous; there are many people around, and your destiny is being decided here. Foreigners drink in the evenings, and I – as a Danish friend of mine, Tue Steen Muller, has observed – react to everything with one English sentence: “Hello, my name is Matelis, I want to present you a project for my film”. I kept repeating and repeating that phrase from my pitching monologue.
The film was edited in ?
It was Katharina Schmidt who edited it: she does not speak a word of Lithuanian. She cut and mounted everything with ideal precision.
I apologise, but what feelings do you have when you edit such a film, put those children together?
We tried to edit it in , but we couldn’t work; we didn’t want to lose any of the material. It was like cutting life. Impossible. We were too deep into the film; we knew what stories we filmed, which ones didn’t make to the film, the children’s destinies: that phantom was following us.
And Katharina... She had read the script. It was the first time when I met an editor who had read the script and all my notes. All correspondence concerning the film. She had viewed all the footage. She new the children. She said to me: your filming is in the past; forget it, relax.
No, this wasn’t a rude barbarity. We had a sincere conversation with her for a couple of days, talked, tried to explain how we felt about everything, whether our opinions about the rhythm and other things matched. Now, she told me, leave me alone. How alone? And the producer told me: sometimes you have to leave the editor alone. I said, this is my film, how can I leave the editor alone? No, no, everything is fine, you have already said everything, and now let her to make some versions and show them to you.
What does this mean, I thought. I come to
She made the versions. We watched, discussed. Our remarks coincided. OK, she said, now leave me alone. So we edited it.
Sometimes I foxed with Katharina; sometimes I used to argue with her jokingly. I used to say: “I’ll bribe you, I’ll take you for dinner, only, please, leave those five seconds for me: look what a stunning shot; how beautifully that nurse leaves; where will you see this again?” “Why do you need those five seconds?” she says, “they will destroy the rhythm.”
And she preserved the rhythm of the film. This is, perhaps, also important – so that the film would not feel too long. Before I made any full-length films, it seemed to me that an hour was a lot, a very long format. And now when I watch it, the hour of Before Flying Back to the Earth passes for me much quicker than, for example, Sunday…, which is only 20 minutes.
I don’t understand how Katharina was editing without understanding the language. Following inspiration? But now I understand what it means to have a co-author.
It seems I start to understand: the life of angels, too painful and scary to touch in , slowly, with joint effort became a film in . About the same angels, but these are already the stories of the screen. This joint effort is a new professional experience to you?
I have always wanted a co-production; not because we don’t have enough money for cinema in , but because through co-production new people come to your film with a completely different experience. You can share this experience and work together.
What, for instance, a producer means in ? We are used to think in that a producer is needed when you look for money for your film, or some other benefits. In , I had a producer who helped to make the film. This is a friend who, in a critical situation, when you are tired and no longer know the way, comes, talks, views the material, suggests some steps, protects, fosters.
In , you write a script and prepare for the presentation of your idea.jpg)
completely on your own. When you film, you are together with the cinematographer, and then you stay alone again. A film director in our country is usually a representative of some seven professions. Then you do everything half-way, not so well as somebody else would do it who has enough time for that. At the end, the director is tired, angry, without any money, not satisfied.
After having spent half a year in Germany, when all the team was working and developing my idea, preparing it for presentation, I started to feel like an artist who enters a shop and can get everything: paints – whatever you like, brushes – whatever you like, canvases as well. I worked with a group and could talk to them. We were all thinking how to present the idea. They all cared about my film. I didn’t have any organisational concerns. I only had to care about the creative side, which is what the director has to do.
I have never worked like this before: blissfully. The happy side.
When you talk about your film, you don’t hide the fact that you have had some personal experience ‘between there and there’. However, you don’t want to tell about this more. I think you are right, but, perhaps, you could tell how you answer this to yourself: why are you doing this?
Because the film is not about my experience. And I don’t want to mislead my future audience. I make a film because I know what it takes to live with a child in an oncological hospital, but my experience has vanished from the film.
When we worked there, others used to come to film too. But how much time they could spend there: two days? In two days you can only confirm what you have known before, have imagined. The time I lived there tells that it’s possible not only to feel compassion, but also to learn something.