The ambassador of a nation that was not there
Aušra Lukošiūnienė’s project began when she was entrusted with 58 boxes of films in France by Perkunas Liutkus, the son of a Lithuanian diplomat now living on the French Riviera. She is later joined by others donated to the Lithuanian National Film Archive in Vilnius. With these materials Aušra began to work. When I met her, she was already developing the website Perfect Time Past in Rome with the films that the Lozoaritis filmed. She needed someone to help her understand what events there were documented, where they happened, and what they represented in the city. I have a special interest in places and the memory they hold, so what Aušra was asking for was an inspiring opportunity to review some of them and discover the history they hold, invisible to us because they belong to another nation. In the films we see the same scenes as in the lives of so many: children playing, cats, snow, a parade in town, a Christmas, grandparents with their granddaughter in the garden, and so on. Nothing different from the images, even banal ones, of any Roman upper middle-class family of the time. Just an ordinary family until politics and history break in: Stasys Sr. Lozoaritis is the ambassador of the Lithuanian Republic to Rome when the Soviet Union annexes it in 1940. Suddenly his professional life is turned upside down, the family’s everyday life turned upside down, and we have to read the “mundane” family pictures through the filter of history. It is interesting to see what this man chooses to film as small nations like his own in Europe begin to experience the tragedies of that period, which eventually result in World War II. Before he is forced to abandon to the Soviet representatives the villa where he lives with his family on Via Nomentana, he has black mourning flags hoisted. Then he has all the flowers cut down. Then he films. The snow covering the city, with the two children playing happily, must almost have been a painful event for people like them who could not return to their homeland: the winter there was long and white and a snowfall was not celebrated as something extraordinary. In the bourgeois Christmas we see, there is a lonely little girl opening presents. The party is in the apartment where the Lozoaritis lived and which also served as an embassy. Stasys Sr. was persistent in keeping open a place where he could continue to do his work and even issue passports from a country that no longer existed. Even if it meant having only one suit of representation (a tailcoat) to share with his two sons, also part of this diplomatic corps without a country. And it is precisely from the tailcoat, the first image we find on the website. that Aušra begins to tell us this story.

Caterina Borelli

Būtasis Kartinis Laikas Romoje
Family archives usually record moments of people’s lives, their feelings, their moods when they choose an object: a landscape, an architectural image, a personal event. They do not contain a narration, they do not pursue the logic of a narrative plot. They are like glimpses, fragments of a gigantic fresco of life. In short clips the camera captures what is important to the operator. Through that eye we can look at the filmmaker’s feelings towards an image, an event, a situation.
In the video archive of the Lozoraitis and Klima family, I found images captured by Stasys Lozoraitis senior, an historical figure. Here we see people who have made a special contribution to Lithuania, without whom our nation would not exist. They have been dealt a “fatal hand”: building a state, making mistakes, surrendering, emigrating, re-establishing themselves, re-emigrating, returning, celebrating victory and starting all over again…
This is how this work was born. It employs an archive of images to introduce the historical family of the Lozoraičiai: diplomats, journalists and romans. Seeing the via Appia Antica in winter with the sheep, looking at the Vatican dome through the window of their studio or raising your head towards the balcony of the Quirinale… all from the same vantage point as today, and thus discover the world of the past.
I invite you, who visit the Eternal City of Rome or who only see it on the screen, to remember the ambassadors of hope who lived and walked on the cobblestones of this city.

Aušra Lukosiūnienė