Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in March 1990, becoming the first former Soviet republic to do so. Its film industry has in recent years made waves on the film festival circuit with social dramas, gangster thrillers, and eccentric slice-of-life films. But its submission for the best international feature Oscar 2026 is taking us back to the early days of independence. If you are craving period oufits, 1990s design, and a soundtrack full of Eurodance classics, from Culture Beat’s “Mr. Vain” to Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam,” Ignas Miškinis’ The Southern Chronicles (Pietinia Kronikas) has you covered. You want to watch a coming-of-age story? Again, this one is for you. The same is true if you want to get a glimpse of some of Lithuania’s up-and-coming actors, or if you are just curious what the highest-grossing Lithuanian movie of all time looks and feels like. Oh, and it won the Baltic competition at the 2024 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) and 12 awards out of 14 nominations at the 2025 Lithuanian Silver Crane Awards, including for best feature film and best director. Adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by Rimantas Kmita, the film follows the story of Rimantas, a 17-year‐old growing up in Lithuania in the 1990s. While more interested in rugby, music, and street life, his encounter with Monika, from a more middle-class family, opens him up to literature, culture, and a different way of seeing the world. The screenplay is by Eglė Vertelytė. The cast features Džiugas Grinys, selected as one of the European Shooting Stars 2024 at the Berlinale, Robertas Petraitis, who stars in this year’s PÖFF noir thriller The Activist, Digna Kulionytė, and Irena Sikorskytė, among others. The Southern Chronicles brings to the screen a mix of 1990s nostalgia and angst. Miškinis recalls not being sure when he was approached about directing the project. “I felt we were a little bit late for the ’90s,” he tells THR. “And I didn’t want to make a movie with a point of view from our days. I was trying to avoid any distance. My vision was to make a movie not about 1994 but to make a movie which looks like it was actually made in 1994.” The director was a teenager himself back then. “We didn’t have YouTube or Facebook, but we had MTV,” he recalls. “MTV was still music television in 1994, so my idea was to use the media, the tools from the ’90s rather than any superficial technical equipment. The budget was also not so huge, so everything was like in the ’90s. But the reason why I chose 16 millimeter film and VHS cameras was part of my vision that this is not a movie about the ’90s, but that it should be a movie from the ’90s.” The songs licensed for The Southern Chronicles weren’t quite to his taste back in the day. “I was more a headbanger with long hair, and I hated those Culture Beat, Snap or whatever or so,” Miškinis tells THR. “This wasn’t my music at all. Even Metallica was too soft for me.” But the director and the rest of the creative team agreed to take off their experts’ and critics’ hats. “We switched to imagining we heard [Metallica’s] ‘Nothing Else Matters’ or ‘Mr. Vain’ for the first time,” he said. “That was very interesting and funny.” The film is set in, and was filmed in, Šiauliai, “the capital of rugby in Lithuania,” explains Miškinis. How was shooting the rugby scenes?” Technically, rugby is difficult to shoot, because you have a lot of people in a scene, and we were trying to build an authentic story, so we thought everyone should play, not act,” the director recalls. “Concert scenes where we had a live performance and at the same time we see the main storytelling with our actors involved were also difficult.” But in terms of rehearsals rather than technical challenges, small scenes can also cause a lot of work. Notes Miškinis: “You can maybe say that nothing happens, but this is when chemistry happens between the actors.” So, does the director look back at the 1990s in Lithuania with nostalgia? Far from it. “For me, the ’90s were the most horrible time in my life,” he tells THR. “Not only for me, for my whole generation. We got independence. I hate the word ‘post-Soviet.’ It means maybe you are still a little bit Soviet. But that time was so dark for me, because I was a teenager, and there was so much corruption, crime, everything. It was like the wild, wild East, a wild time.” He once even tried to write a script about the period, “and it was far, far from a comedy,” Miškinis shares. “So, when I first got the offer to make The Southern Chronicles, my reaction was no, I don’t want to make a comedy about that time. Go away! But when we started to develop it, I realized that maybe it’s my problem. And maybe it’s a way to talk about that time that will be easier for me and the audience to watch it with a little bit of a smile on the face and to laugh at ourselves and at the ’90s.” Check out more international Oscar contenders here: Egypt’s Oscar Hopeful ‘Happy Birthday’ Follows an 8-Year-Old Maid Who Is a Class Act in a World of Classism
