Directed by Lithuanian filmmaker Vytautas Katkus, Cherries is a surprising and well-crafted short competing for the Short Film Palme d’Or.
As the 75th Cannes Film Festival continues to unfold, we delved into the Short Film Competition, in which a selection of 9 films spanning from 9 countries, are taking a part to win the Short Film Palme d’Or which will be awarded on Saturday, May 28 during the closing ceremony.
Selected from 3,507 submissions from over 140 countries, this year’s nominees are: “A Short Story” (Bi Gan, China), “Melancholy of My Mother’s Lullabies” (Abinash Bikram Shah, Nepal/Hong Kong), “The Water Murmurs” (Story Chen, China), “Night Light” (Kim Torres, Costa Rica), “Same Old” (Llyod Lee Choi, US), “Fire at the Lake” (Pierre Menahem), “Persona” (Sujin Moon, South Korea), “TSUTSUƐ” (Amartei Armar, Ghana/France), and “Cherries” (Vytautas Katkus, Lithuania).
Director Vytautas Katkus is a promising young Lithuanian filmmaker who previously presented his directorial short film debut Community Gardens at the Critics’ Week in 2019, while his second short Miegamasis rajonas premiered at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival. This year, Vytautas Katkus is unveiling his latest work Cherries (Uogos) in the Cannes Short Competition. Aside from directing, he has also served as cinematographer on a number of films by fellow emerging Lithuanian talents, including the short Techno, Mama directed by Saulius Baradinskas, an entry for the 2022 European Film Awards – which, I must say, was my favourite short film of 2021.
Packed in the 15 minutes format, the film follows a recently retired father as he invites his son to help him with the cherry-picking in the garden. With a real sense of places, plot, connection, and conversation through its two main characters (played by the director and his own real father), this narrative short feels like a documentary on almost every level, but with its unique approaches to the story, Cherries feels greater than one would expect from a documentary – it is shot on 16mm and the cinematography, helmed by DoP Simonas Glinskis, is absolutely fascinating. The film then evolves into something beyond imagination and will leave viewers shaking and thinking long after the credits roll.
With his upcoming project The Visitor, which just won Next Step Award at Critics’ Week Cannes, a program designed to help talents as they make the leap from short to feature films, I certainly cannot wait to see Tautas’s works in the future.
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