PREMIERE Girls Don’t Cry + Q&A with Lina Lužytė

The national premiere of the film “Girls Don’t Cry” (dir. Sigrid Klausmann, Lina Lužytė) will take place during the “Inconvenient Films” festival.

The six girls – Nancy, Sheelan, Sinai, Paige, Selenna and Nina – live thousands of kilometres apart, in countries with vastly different circumstances, educational opportunities, and women’s rights. Yet they all share the same desire to lead a self-determined life in freedom and equality. They navigate the complexities of adolescence, make bold decisions in challenging situations, fight courageously against brutal traditions, and challenge social constraints and pressure to conform. We meet Nancy in Tanzania, who escaped female genital mutilation and now lives in a protective shelter. In South Korea, Sinai rejects conventional beauty ideals and behavioural norms, training hard every day in preparation for the BMX World Championships. In England, 16-year-old Paige raises her baby son, having decided at the last minute not to have an abortion. Selenna, from Santiago de Chile, was born in the body of a boy and today is a passionate activist for transgender rights. Since her deportation from Germany, Nina has been living in a Roma settlement in Novi Sad, Serbia. Meanwhile, Sheelan, a Yezidi girl, has found a new home in Germany.

The premiere screenings will take place at the Kaunas Ąžuolynas Library on October 25th (free of charge) and in Vilnius on October 26th at the Forum Cinemas Vingis cinema.

Lina Lužytė was born in Vilnius in 1985. In 2011, she completed her master’s degree in film directing at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater. Since then, she has made three feature films – Forever Together (premiered at Karlovy Vary, 2016), The Castle (premiered at Galway Film Fleadh, 2020), and Johatsu (premiered at Tallinn Black Nights), and two documentaries: Igrushki (2012) tells the story of toy makers persecuted by the Belarusian militia, and her latest documentary work, Picnic in Moria (2022), was filmed in Europe’s largest refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, Greece.

Lužytė’s work often focuses on people in unbearable or even grotesque circumstances, and her films are characterized by subtle, often uncomfortable humor. The director is currently working on a feature-length dramatic comedy, Kapeika, in which capitalism is criticized through an absurd incident involving a broken BMW mirror.