For the last in my conversation series for this year, it was my pleasure to speak with Lithuanian writer-director, Aistė Žegulytė and her co-writer, Vėjūnė Tamuliūnaitė, dramaturge and scriptwriter for the nonfiction film, Holy Destructors (Biodestruktoriai), one of my favorite films of the past year. Full disclosure, I was on the jury that awarded the film Best Baltic Documentary at November’s Black Nights Film Festival (Pimedate Ööde filmifestival, PÖFF) in Tallinn, Estonia, the same week Aistė received the Best Director Award in the Envision Competition at IDFA.
Understanding the unseen is the territory of many disciplines, including documentary filmmaking. Those “unseen” might happen to be a group of people hidden away in a pocket of the planet somewhere or perhaps exploring the state of spiritual grace, or soul, and what those ideas evoke. In the case of wanting to understand and explore what cannot be seen by the human eye – but can be seen under powerful microscopes and camera lenses – microbes or micro-fungi are also silent warriors, tiny beings that possess the strength to spark monumental impacts in various disciplines in the worlds of both art and science. In Holy Destructors, we meet some of the people who journey daily through those invisible kingdoms, exploring the profound influence of the infinitesimal.
Ingeniously constructed, Holy Destructors tells the story of death and decay in precise and luminous frames. Aistė and her marvelous team capture both the grand sweep, and minute detail, of our shared humanity, our bio-beingness with all things sentient, past, present and future. It is a great achievement that reinvigorates the documentary form itself, whilst also supplying deep and essential portraits of various characters that help to explicate what we, as a species, might hold in our collective memories. It is a courageous and innovative kind of cinema, one that artfully weaves the marvels of the secret universe of the soul and scientific exploration. Utilizing unorthodox audiovisual language to play with our perspectives and perceptions on the undeniable process of decay and re-generation, while also challenging our often-predictable ways of objectifying cinematic images, Aistė uses the quiet process of restoration of medieval artworks as a metaphor for destruction and renewal.
After first studying Photographic Technology at the Vilnius University of Applied Engineering Sciences, Aistė enrolled in the Cinema Directing school at the Lithuanian Music and Theater Academy. Her graduation project was the documentary film, Identities. She then went on to make several fiction and nonfiction short films, followed by her first feature-length film called, Animus Animalis (a story about People, Animals and Things) in 2018, which focuses on themes of life, death, and taxidermy.
We were joined in this discussion by Vėjūnė Tamuliūnaitė, the co-scriptwriter of Holy Destructors. She and Aistė attended the Music and Theater Academy in Vilnius at the same time, but never really crossed paths there. Vėjūnė saw Animus Animalis in Lithuania and later wrote to Aistė to tell her that she would be keen to work with her on her next project. Vėjūnė is a Lithuanian screenwriter working in both documentary and fiction films. She graduated with a BA in Screenwriting from the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy in 2015. Her work often explores human sensitivity, transformation, and the relationship between inner and outer landscapes. She collaborates closely with directors, mainly in documentary storytelling, and occasionally teaches screenwriting at Lithuanian film schools.
Pamela Cohn (PC): It’s very rare to get to interview co- writers so it’s a logical place to start by discussing what a film like this asks of the writing process in documentary. The film is quite light on text – we hear mostly muted snippets of conversation, ambient dialogue and other diagetic sounds. But most of it is told solely through audiovisual storytelling. This lack of exposition or explication when dealing with quite a complex and huge canvas of ideas as you do here, is a brave choice.
Aistė Žegulytė (AZ): Writing for me is very difficult, even getting down a synopsis of what I want to express. It was incredible timing when Vėjūnė wrote to me as I was struggling with how to describe this film in words.
Vėjūnė Tamuliūnaitė (VT): Yes, this was already four years ago now. I knew Aistė from the Academy, but we never collaborated there. I saw her feature début, Animus Animalis, a beautiful documentary that is one of my favorites. It had received the Lithuanian prize for best documentary. At the awards, which were broadcast on TV, she was very concise and just said, “Documentary is cool.” [laughing] A few months after that, I texted her to tell her I’d be very interested in working with her, which happened to be the same moment Aistė was struggling with the writing for Holy Destructors. We talk about this so much amongst friends and colleagues about the fact that it’s so important to be vocal if you want to work with someone; you need to let them know. In school, we mostly wrote fiction scripts of course, the more traditional way of studying scriptwriting.
AZ: When I was studying at The Kieślowski Film School in Poland, we did write scripts for documentary and that was very important, to learn how to write scripts for all kinds of films. I was so happy when Vėjūnė wrote to me.
PC: What was it you were struggling with precisely?
AZ: Well, even though we had started shooting, I still needed to write some kind of synopsis about what I wanted to say and show. I worked with another screenwriter, Licia Eminenti, for about five months. But I was very happy when Vėjūnė joined us. Only after I started to work with her did we finally develop the layers of the human world, which Vėjūnė looked at with infinite sensitivity, sincerity and simplicity. For me, it was hard to crystallize ideas on paper with the footage we had, as it was also difficult to project what could happen in the future.
VT: I had worked on another documentary film and learned some things from that. We didn’t really know how a script for a documentary should look. That was somewhat freeing since you can invent the form you want. But it’s also challenging because you need to invent something with no previous standard to follow. Aistė and I used this same approach when we had to supply a script for this film’s funding. She already had some material shot so we started from there. I watched all the footage, and we talked a lot about trying to find the core and the direction she wanted to go. It took many years and a lot of versions.
Recently, I looked at our initial versions of the script and we did end up coming back to some of the very first ideas we spoke about. We came full circle, but this time being fully conscious of all the decisions. To me, that proves that from the very beginning, Aistė had a very strong vision. I appreciate that there’s experimentation in the form itself but the meanings inherent in that form are very deep and they come from the stories she wants to tell.
AZ: I was never interested in directing people. It was just about looking at the material we had shot with them and managing that. I have my own rules, and that includes not asking people to do things for the camera. Sometimes, I might offer some kind of provocation to a protagonist in some other way. But not in this film. For the people appearing in Holy Destructors, I did not want to direct in that way, so I forbade myself to disturb them in their work in any way. I wanted to look, to observe, and with those observations create movements and language.
PC: I think part of the overall delight of the film is that your presence does cause some kind of performative impulse in the people in front of your camera but, for me, what’s often so moving about documentary subjects is that this presence of a director, a crew, and the attention showered upon them – in this instance, the restorers and scientists – brings out their humanity more fully, both in and outside the workplace.
AZ: I do work very much from intuition. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, and I do feel somehow that there could be a lot of wasted time working from intuition. But I do try to follow it and then add knowledge to it, the things I learned in school, for instance. But what I’m following mostly are my feelings around things in terms of how I can make them work for the viewer, what they can understand intellectually, and what they can feel. I had discussions with my cinematographer, Vytautas Katkus, about the feelings we want to create on set or in certain shots, but not necessarily about the action around those feelings. For me, it’s more important to talk about mood, not what we need to capture.
We tried to find people who could explain the processes involved, the time and work it takes to work on just a small part of something to restore it, the detail involved. This was explained to us so that we would be able to figure out how to shoot it over the course of the three months it took them to, for example, put together the bones of the body for the crypt. Or how to film this decomposition so we can show what happens under the microscope.
PC: It was interesting to me that some of these scientists and other professionals doing the work are also believers, meaning that for them, the objects, paintings, icons, bones, that they were restoring involved more than just the technical know-how. These objects held sacredness, as they do for the worshippers in a church or during the Semana Santa (Holy Week) processions in Spain. It’s conveyed in how they approach the work, how they handle it, how they move around it.
AZ: Exactly, I agree. Because when one touches this object from a time long past, the Middle Ages, for instance, there is something more than only material there. To understand that is to feel what is unseen. When Vėjūnė first saw footage of Janina, the restorer, Vėjūnė felt strongly that she should be one of the main characters. We didn’t plan on following her at first, but she became a fuller character. And as we began to follow Janina, many beautiful documentary moments started happening on set. For us and for the film, they were like small miracles.
VT: Later, the editor, Danielius Kokanauskis, had seen this footage of Janina and he was fascinated by her. On paper and through discussion, we can determine that something is moving, but the footage might tell us something different. For Aistė, the fascinating thing for her is the micro-fungi, the way things interconnect and build relationally. I never actually met any of the protagonists and so I have this distance from the world in which Aistė’s shooting, so that gives a different perspective, of course. But it did already feel like Janina was a character. She’s an archetypal mother figure.
AZ: Yes, like a Madonna a little bit.
VT: We were interested in the relationship between human beings, time and tradition. Also, there is the relationship of the restorers with their work and the paintings. I wouldn’t say all of them are believers but there was still some kind of relationship with the work – a very deep curiosity or yes, also a religious connection, but always something personal. I think it is the very core of the film. When I watch it, it makes me feel calm, watching the restorers work. The world is so chaotic, and this chaos seems to be growing bigger every day. We see a lot of darkness. And then I watch these restorers sitting there scrubbing gently away at a small portion of a canvas, the rituals of how they do what they do, and it feels very pure.
AZ: There’s also a little bit of absurdity there since it’s about trying to fight time, knowing anyway that things are decaying at the same time they are fighting this decay.
VT: It is absurd in the way that it doesn’t make logical sense, but still, it’s very beautiful that we, as humans, keep preserving anyway, even knowing it will decay. This urge to fight decay cannot be destroyed.
AZ: I think in these little movements and the repetition of these movements, we find the purpose of our existence. There was the script on paper and then there was the script that was written in the editing room. That’s where the more intuitive narrative lines emerged while not trying to wander too far away from the paper script we had. So, it was playing with that and the filmed material. In my opinion, Danielius is the best Lithuanian editor around. He’s worked with some of the greatest directors. He works intuitively as well with structure while never losing sight of story, the energy of it, but in a purely visual way.
The scene with the strawberry on the birthday cake breaking down in the kitchen, for instance, we filmed repeatedly over the course of six months to catch that beautiful shot. It takes time to understand how we go from the circular frame to a square one when we shift from one to the other, to zoom in microscopically and then move out again. With Danielius, we loved to follow the Sergei Eisenstein / Artavazd Peleshyan film theory of editing, where the metaphors that exist are created in the edit. In other words, another thing entirely is created through the cut itself, frame by frame. It’s very important to create metaphors that way because it helps to create certain impressions and emotions for the spectator. The micro-fungi themselves are also a metaphor.
PC: Besides the quiet of the labs and offices where the scientists do their work, and the serenity of the Lithuanian churches, we go to Spain for the Semana Santa procession, an initially quite disorienting shift, but one that puts humans again at the center of this extravagant pageant of transformation, transubstantiation, and the re-generation of the body through the Christ figure and Mother Mary. This is also when the circle frame becomes quite literal, what a god’s-eye view of us could resemble.
AZ: For me, it is the micro-fungi that took me to the church spaces. At first it was about the way they digest the paintings and the artworks that we see the people in the film working with. The church is an important place for me in my life – I didn’t use it merely as a place to film something. But when I am following the movements of the micro-fungi, they lead me to the church, because they are also there, of course, along with the unveiling of this miraculous painting of the Madonna that Janina has restored.
In terms of the story in Spain, Vytautas, the cinematographer, was in Valladolid at a film festival and he sent me a photo of the brotherhood and how they are dressed for Semana Santa. I knew that would be important to go and film them there during Holy Week. At first it was a challenge to figure out how to fold that into the other material. When we were shooting it, we had this rule that the people would be seen as a representation of micro-fungi in a petri dish – a culture of humans.
PC: I’ve seen a lot of Semana Santa portrayals in both fiction and nonfiction that are quite striking, but the shooting here in particular is just divine – no pun intended. Every frame is imbued with this sort of devotion that we just don’t see much of anymore and it occurred to me that this is really the divide between the mundane and the transcendent in all of us.
VT: I think that the scenes in Valladolid and those of the restorers’ world could be thought of as opposite sides of some pole. I would say yes that could be true. But also, it’s not quite that literal. As we’ve been speaking about, Aistė is the kind of director who wants to add more lines, more complexity into the narrative, to explore new forms. It can be challenging when connecting the stories. But I think especially in Valladolid, the circle frame works beautifully because of that distance it creates – it’s like someone is watching from a certain perspective, like through a microscope, looking at us humans, performing these rituals while also portraying how different the relationship towards that tradition every individual in that massive crowd could have. It raises the same question about people trying to preserve something very ancient but meaningful to them.
PC: Much documentary filmmaking still feels somewhat blunt, quite fundamentalist in the way we’re supposed to grapple with bigger ideas. This film is successful on many levels but your rubric for adding more and more complexity is rare. Has the making of this film changed your perspectives at all on the way you’ll make and view nonfiction films going forward?
AZ: My answers around this are very emotional since the main theme I’m interested in is death, to understand how people deal with it. In all the material, I search for and want to find the soul. What has soul? It can be a smell, a feeling, a sound, whatever, but I want to create a film soul that keeps me, personally, hopeful about this existence. We live in a tragic world so keeping that hope in the midst of certain death is at the center of what I want to say, and that is belief in the soul. Not very logical, I know. [laughing]
VT: I think that complexity comes from the process itself. First, I strongly believe that when we create films, we do need to have our own personal connection to the topic, otherwise it’s just not sincere. Depending on ways of working, of course, but each team member adds something there. Then we go to the intellectual part of the process, where we start doing research on different levels: documentary research of filming and waiting, then talking with scientists and professionals to gather different perspectives on the topic, and then lots and lots of reading. Finally, we come back to the beginning to check if the core is still the same. I think that while creating a complex narrative, it’s important to step back from all the intellectual ideas and focus on what we see and feel while watching a story. I personally like films that do not provide answers but rather raise questions. This can bring complexity as well.
AZ: And then, following that, is the understanding that you are mostly wrong about everything so then you come back and start again. It’s natural to feel lost most of the time – like you do when you’re picking mushrooms in the forest. Like in a documentary, we’re picking miracles in life because we are surrounded by the big, beautiful forest of the universe.
Pamela Cohn is an international arts writer, moving image curator, nonfiction and experimental story structure consultant, and guest lecturer. She’s the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (OR Books, New York & London, 2020), and co-producer, writer and host of The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image. She is an independent member of FIPRESCI, and hosts public filmmaker talks at various film festivals and exhibitions.
