Sand in Your Hair

Can love overcome loneliness and resist social taboos?

Malvina is an 80-year-old former ballerina. Her divorce in the courtroom is the beginning of her journey out of solitary confinement. When Malvina and her fiancé Kipras, who is the same age, buy tickets to Berlin, they notice that they don’t have Kipras’s passport – he had left it at the nursing home. Unfortunately, the head of the institution has no intention of giving him the passport, instead forcing Kipras to continue his treatment for dementia.
Can love overcome loneliness and resist social taboos? What dark mechanisms of coercion lie behind our facade of respect for old age? This trip has been put off too long for it to be stopped now.

Keywords: elderly people, love

Director's note:
This film delves into loneliness as a natural but tragic human condition on both physical and psychological levels. By examining societal stigmas surrounding agisim, I aim to portray ephemeral loneliness cinematically. I focus on the pauses in the plot, using a wide-angle lens to intimately capture the main characters and the emptiness that follows their physical interactions. Through thoughtful mise-en-scène and long takes, I create a sense of realness and fragility. The film's atmosphere is built by contrasts of harsh, cold light with a soft, caressing glow that smooths away fatigue's wrinkles. The music will be used fragmentary as if echoing sighs of relief while climbing stairs. What cannot be conveyed by the actors' dialogue or the visuality of the frame, I have entrusted to dance: the imperfect, authentic movements of the ageing body will complete the emotional picture of the characters and will speak to the viewer's own imagination and feelings.

Producer's note:
Screenwriter and director M.Verbiejus turns to one of the most vulnerable groups in society – the elderly. This is a sensitive movie with light irony that touches on important themes: love, loneliness and the human desire to live freely, regardless of age. Lithuanian Film Centre, Creative Europe MEDIA, Lithuanian National Radio and Television has already supported the preparatory works and the production of the film. It is an honor for us to work with Jūratė Onaitytė, Liubomiras Laucevičius, Juozas Budraitis–notable Lithuanian actors. We just wrapped up the shooting in Lithuania and Latvia. We have provided very fresh images form the shooting put together for your consideration (please bear in mind there is no sound post-production, music and color grading yet). We plan to have the final version of the film in March 2025. We will be thrilled to present the film in the coming soon section in Tallinn Baltic Event and to find partners for sales and to get Festivals interest.