Peace To Us In Our Dreams
France, Lithuania, Russia 2015

Peace to Us in Our Dreams is a story about a man who takes his teenage daughter and his girlfriend, a violinist, to a country house to spend a weekend. They are all in a state of personal crisis which they are trying to make sense of. The violinist breaks down in the middle of a public performance and leaves the stage. The man is reaching a point in his life when he no longer looks ahead but back. The daughter, facing adolescence, yearns for the mother she no longer has. She befriends a local boy, the son of alcoholic villagers, who is no less lost in life, in search of his own identity and desires.

As is usual with Bartas, the characters function as both archetypes and possible ways for the viewers to incarnate their own experiences. He lets the actors improvise using the lines in the script as a basis until the dialogue sounds true to life, striving for the greatest possible authenticity. The film is composed of the director’s signature long shots and is marked by its slow pace and deeply atmospheric landscapes. However, the last 30 minutes of the film are, untypically of Bartas, almost  chatty. Peace to Us in Our Dreams is less epic and more intimate than Bartas’ previous films and it is probably his most personal film to date. No wonder the man is played by Bartas himself, the daughter by the daughter of Bartas and the late Katya Golubeva, and the violinist by a real-life violinist who later became the director’s real-life girlfriend.

Awards
Cannes FF,  Quinzaine des Realisateurs 2015