Mantas (work in progress) combines two distinct stories.
The first is that of the lithuanian film director Mantas Kvedaravičius, whose anthropological preoccupations shaped the documentary film Mariupolis, which presents the lives of the inhabitants of the harbor-city with the same name, at the beginning of the war in 2014, when Russia attacked Donbas. The documentary film stood out by portraying the life of the simple people of Mariupol, insisting on the little joys that they were ambitiously living despite the conflict, rather than the destruction and trauma created by the ongoing war. In 2022, at the outbreak of the war that still rages in Ukraine, Mantas returned from Africa to Ukraine with his fiancée, the actress Hanna Bilobrova. He died on the streets of Mariupol, a city that he fell in love with during the prior film shootings, being executed by the russian soldiers.
The second story is inspired by the interview “MY APARTMENT WAS DESTROYED BY BOMBS AND EVERYTHING IN IT WAS STOLEN” conducted by Nicoleta Musat as part of the project Moving Fireplaces in 2022. It describes the tragic circumstances from which Ukrainians Yulia Kondakova and Jane Rozbitskaya managed to flee at the outbreak of war, the feelings they experienced in their search for refuge.
The project Mantas imagines what would have happened if the director and his fiancée had met the interviewees on their way to Mariupol. Would they have succeeded in persuading him to give up? Would the director still be alive today? The answers to these questions will be elucidated through the installation/performance proposed by Bogdan Sărătean.
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Project selected through the Moving Fireplaces 2023 Call for projects and artistic interventions, proposed by Bogdan Sărătean, founder of BIS Theatre.
BIS Theatre is an independent company based in Sibiu, Romania. The first performances took place in alternative venues in Sibiu in the autumn of 2006, and in the spring of 2009 they formed an NGO – BIS Cultural Association. The emergence of this structure was therefore organic. At the time of its legal establishment, BIS Theatre was already active in the performing arts, in the organization of events.At present BIS Theatre is a cluster of 13 artists from various fields of expression (actors, musicians, visual artists).
