Interview with Tomas Vengris, the director of "Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania", interviewer Javier Garcia Puerto
"Tomas Vengris is a Lithuanian-American film artist, who graduated from the well-renowned University of Columbia in the US, and received a Masters in directing from the American Film Institute. His debut film “Motherland” (2019) was received with praise, which encouraged him to take on a more interwoven and site-specific story.
“Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania” centers on 5 separate love stories, taking place in an Airbnb in Vilnius. The flat is rented by people from various countries such as Ireland, Poland, Hungary and Israel. Each new booking brings a new crisis of love to the apartment, all while having no idea what has happened in the same place before their stay. The quiet cleaning lady, Jolanta, comes to prepare the rooms for new guests, but never meets any of the renters - she only sees the marks that their stories have left. Meanwhile, her own love story of sorts starts to unfold.
“The love stories is an ironic title, I wouldn't say these stories are happy romantic stories, it's more about a crisis of love,” the director Vengris explains. “The whole thesis of the film is about how we are more connected than we think,” he explained. Surprisingly the main character is an object, the story is told from the apartment's point of view. Vengris explores the idea of how the walls of the buildings are witnesses for our human emotions and dramas.
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