Giedrė Žickytė had only met fellow Lithuanian Irena Veisaitė, academic, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist, a few times before she received an email following a radio interview that the filmmaker gave. “Irena shared what resonated with her, and said she thinks about certain things the same way,” Žickytė tells BDE. “It was a beautiful, personal reflection – not a business letter, but a human one. It felt incredibly good to receive it. I thought, no one writes letters like this anymore in today’s fast-paced world. It was like a handwritten letter from a previous century.”
After the pair later met for tea, Žickytė, who was at the time making her documentary feature The Jump, resolved to make Irena the subject of her next film. Nobody had previously profiled this “deeply charismatic personality,” the filmmaker says. “Her life story revealed the most painful chapters of 20th-century European history.”
A Goodnight Kiss opens on Irena’s frenetic 92nd birthday in 2020 as she is taking countless messages on multiple devices from well-wishers. “She cannot sit down at the table to celebrate because the phone keeps ringing, sometimes three at once,” director Žickytė tells BDE. “People from all over the world are calling. This introduction to the film was not chosen at random – it perfectly reveals how much the professor was loved and needed by many people.”
We are then transported back to pre-WW2 Lithuania, whose capital Vilnius was termed the Jerusalem of the North because of its large and vibrant Jewish population. Irena, herself a Jew, was born in the city of Kaunas, into a wealthy family whose happiness and unity was shattered firstly by her parents’ divorce in 1938, and then by the onset of war. When visiting her estranged father in Berlin, he instructed her to sit on a bench that was set aside for Jews only. As a Lithuanian Jew she was, at least before the war broke out, exempt from the treatment meted out to her German counterparts. Nevertheless, her father wanted her to experience at first hand the senses both of discrimination and isolation that they had to suffer.
Irena recalls her last, and painful, conversation with her mother Sofija, who had been arrested by the Lithuanian home guard following the Nazi invasion of teh country. Her mother told her to be independent, to always live a life defined by truth, and thirdly (and most dearly, she says), never to take revenge. These were values she espoused for the rest of her life. Her mother was executed by the Nazis mere days after their last meeting.
Veisaitė was gifted a second mother in the form of the Catholic Stefanija Paliulytė Ladigienė, already with six children and the wife of a Lithuanian general, who took in Irena after she was smuggled out of the Kaunas ghetto. Had the authorities discovered that Stefanija was harbouring a Jew, she and her children would have been summarily executed, we are told in the film, whose title derives from the motherly kiss Stefanija gave a stunned Irena on her first night of safety.
The film continues to tell, via family photos, graphic archive and Irena’s measured but heart-breaking testimony, of the post-War incarceration of second-mother Stefanija in a gulag in Siberia, and of Irena’s troubled university education in Vilnius where she is accused of, and interrogated over, her status as the daughter of a bourgeois. Irena then addresses the inherent weakness within the newly independent Lithuania for refusing to acknowledge the part played by Lithuanian nationals during the Holocaust, and she remembers her mistaken belief that she would never again see such atrocities…until the war in former-Yugoslavia.
We also see footage of the great love of her life, Estonian filmmaker Grigori Kromanov, for whom she left her first husband Jakov Boom in 1971. At first, neither Grigori nor Irena spoke each other’s language, but such was the strength of their love it overcame any such hurdle. They remained together for 13 years, 3 months and three days, we are told, before his untimely death in 1984.
In 1974 Boom left Lithuania for London, together with his and Irena’s daughter Alina. To acknowledge the enormous sense of loss that Irena felt for her estranged daughter, her friend, the esteemed Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, wrote the piano piece Für Alina, which has become part of the classical canon.
Towards the end of the film we see Irena decide on lettering to be used on her gravestone, already in situ beside that of her beloved Kromanov. She died from Covid at the end of 2020, as the documentary was in production.
“My initial vision was to make this film without archival narrative – just to follow Irena through observation and reveal her story through everyday situations,” Žickytė tells Business Doc Europe how she first envisioned her film. “As she interacted with people around her, gave interviews to various journalists, worked on her autobiographical book, and so on, she would sometimes recall moments from the past, and her back story would emerge from that. The archives would emerge organically from what Irena herself brought in or commented on – on her computer screen, in her book, or in the photographs covering the walls of her whole apartment… That was the creative task and the form I had set for myself.”
“However, when Irena passed away and we had to stop filming, it became impossible to continue the original vision because it was not enough material. Then I turned to the archives and thought how to bring together layers of present-day scenes and archival footage from the past,” she adds.
Core to this approach was the astonishing archive of George Kaushik, a photographer and prisoner of the Kaunas Ghetto, who secretly chronicled life there.
“Kaushik photographed in secret, through a hole in his coat, using an amateur camera. There are accounts that some ghetto policemen understood what he was doing but looked the other way. He captured the ghetto’s residents and their everyday life. It’s an entirely different perspective, compared to the images taken by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. There are only two such archives in the world that show this insider’s perspective, testimonies created by the prisoners themselves: in the Kaunas and Lodz ghettos,” says Žickytė
“I don’t know how Irena herself would react now to the archival footage and photographs in the film. She had lived through all of it, seen it with her own eyes. Sometimes I think, perhaps it’s better that I discovered all this only after her death. It might have been too painful for her to return to those same ghetto streets,” the filmmaker further reflects.
The story Žickytė tells in A Goodnight Kiss forms part of a tragic continuum that extended into former-Yugoslavia and now into Ukraine, as well as to other countries within the former-Soviet region. It is therefore a film of great contemporary resonance.
“When we first started filming Irena, it was the end of 2019. Already then, she could sense the tensions and emerging flashpoints of conflict growing in the world. She shared her fear that the world was drifting back toward 1938–39, and she worried about it deeply,” Žickytė recalls her friend and subject’s unease. “At that time [in 2019], we were still living in an entirely different emotional landscape, unable to imagine that the events of the previous century might repeat themselves, that the past could once again become the present. But Irena, having lived through those things herself, already sensed that the vibrations in society were dangerous, that the air was becoming saturated. She recognized the signs repeating. She was extremely sensitive to any expression of hatred. ‘Hatred is contagious.’ She spoke about this constantly.”
“Irena knew very well where hatred leads, because she had experienced it herself,” the filmmaker continues. “As a child, she lived through blind hatred and witnessed the horror and killings it brought. Perhaps that is why throughout her life she spread the opposite message – one of light, dialogue, and understanding. Irena knew how to talk about the most sensitive, complex topics in a way that didn’t pit people against each other. Even when speaking about Lithuanian/Jewish relations – a subject that often stirs strong emotions – she knew how to bring people together rather than divide them. It is such a rare quality to speak about difficult things without hurting or offending anyone.”
Žickytė further reflects how, during the film’s rough-cut stage, the “wonderful” editor Atanas Georgie (Honeyland) joined her, and together they completed the edit. “After watching the early version of the film, still with its [original] title, his first reaction was: ‘This isn’t A Tale of Two Mothers, it’s A Tale of Three Mothers.’
“And he was absolutely right. The third mother is Irena herself – her own personal story and her story of love,” Žickytė ends.
International sales of A Goodnight Kiss are handled by Stranger Films Sales.
