This year, at VIDEOGRAMS, we also invite you to meet director Simona Žemaitytė at a very special work-in-progress presentation of her new film. In May 2022, Žemaitytė started filming a many-time national weightlifting champion from Ukraine, who temporarily left his country with his family for Lithuania when the bombing of the Irpin city began. Simona Žemaitytė raises questions about alternative forms of resistance, internal and external struggles, discipline, and masculinity. Today, the hero of the upcoming film has returned to Ukraine, where he continues to train Ukrainian children in a city badly affected by the war and prepares himself for future sports events.

Simona Žemaitytė’s works won awards at the 15th Tallinn Triennal and the Sheffield DocFest. Her films were displayed at the Kaunas Biennal, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Cinémathèque Française, Kasa Gallery and Galata Perform (Istanbul), BAFTA and RichMix (London), CAC, Vartai, Titanikas and Kairė-Dešinė galleries (Vilnius), the “CreArte” exhibition (Pardubice, Linz, and Genoa), Centrala Space (Birmingham). She taught at the Royal Holloway College and the UCL in London. She is currently studying for a Ph.D. in Fine Arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA) and teaches at the Department of Sculpture at VAA

Simona Žemaitytė
Feedback, 74’, 2019

Saulius, or Sal as his friends from London called him, was a Dj, a passionate vinyl collector as well as one of the creative minds behind the last.fm internet radio project in its early beginnings. He was a universal restless character, a rebel, an anti-system, always part of collaborations and multiple creative projects, organising parties and events, listening to music and gathering people. Born as Saulius Čemolonskas in 1964 in Kaunas, he escaped Soviet Lithuania with forged documents in 1989 and spent most of his life in London. Countless hours of his archive of music, sound and videos recorded on VHS, DV and 8mm cassettes encapsulate Saulius’ rebellious character, his playfulness and creativity as well as his surroundings from times of turmoil and revolt in 1980’s Lithuania to the late 90’s London music scene to recent times and his own private past. Filmmaker Simona Žemaitytė who had known Saulius for almost a decade, uses his archive material to depict the story which could be called a universal human quest to escape or an attempt against the system (any, really). The longer we look beyond the ‘patina’ of time through the VHS and the DV (bringing images of long lost cities, both Kaunas and London) the more we understand that perhaps Sal was one such person that each of us has known once, anywhere, anytime in our lives. Saulius passed away in 2017. His ashes are in his friend’s music studio in London.

Simona Žemaitytė (born 1984) is a Lithuanian artist and filmmaker, living and working in London and Vilnius. It took Simona almost five years to find VHS tapes that Sal occasionally mentioned in their conversations after giving her a copy of his entire archive. She had filmed Sal performing with Terry Burrows and Laure Prouvost among others and made a few projects based on his biography. Simona’s own work was previously awarded at the 15th Tallinn Print Triennial and nominated for an award at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival. Previous exhibitions and shows include Kasa Gallery, Galata Perform (Istanbul), BAFTA, RichMix (London), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius) and others.