Jankus Karolis
Experimental film director, artist-researcher
In 1993, over fifty spectators gathered at the ‘Langas’ art gallery in Vilnius for the performance The Menaced Assassin, which lasted more than 10 hours, continuing until the very last observer had left the gallery space. A work by the famous Belgian surrealist René Magritte, used by Karolis Jankus to attract viewers, turned into a real trap for the performance spectators. The performer, dressed in a smoking costume and a bowler hat, kept repeating the same absurd text over and over again, reciting various prohibitions and strict instructions. According to the concept, the performance could not end as long as at least one spectator was watching it, which is why the spectator became the most important part of the creation. Karolis Jankus called it an experimental performance whose goal, through means of manipulation, was to question the traditional performance methods.
After winning the French-Baltic Video Art Festival in 1997, Karolis Jankus received a scholarship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and went to Paris, where he created his first experimental film Ils Vous Baisent Les Mains. The film was made using the filming method of the TV show hidden camera, which captured the atmosphere of hatred in the Saint-Denis quarter at that time from an unexpected angle.
The following year, in 1998, Karolis Jankus finished his sculpture studies at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts. His final work Hamlet Forward And Backward, which was presented at the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre in the exhibition Time To Be Young And Time to Grow, raised the question of whether sculpture can be a literary text. The creation consisted of two sheets of BO-size paper on which the key phrases of the final scene of William Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet were printed in reverse and in correct order. Therefore, Hamlet, turned back by Karolis Jankus, first died and then killed the king.
In 2003-2004, Karolis Jankus continued to work with the concept of Hybrid Immortality in his short films, exploring the multiplicity of human death.
In the short film Dead Body Asks For Help, a dead man asks a gangster driving from Buffalo to Detroit to kill him, and the movie Girl and Bones is about a girl who digs up the bones of her deceased lover and, bringing them home, continues to live happily with them. Both films were presented at the Encounters 10th Bristol Short Film Festival and SITGES 36th Film Festival in Barcelona. 2004-2005 participated in exhibitions The New Ten MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim; Museum voor Modern Kunst, Oostend and the exhibition E.U. Positive Berlin Art Academy, Berlin and Rauma Biennale Balticum 2004 – Talking to Me? Rauma Art Museum in Finland.
Jesus from Lithuania is Karolis Jankus’s first full-length feature film, created according to the rules of the Dogma 95 movement and in the tradition of narrative experimental cinema. In the film, the author continued the theme of death, manipulated by religious canons, and deleted the boundaries between the canonised gospel history and the realities of the present, creating his alternative history of Jesus. In the work of Karolis Jankus, Jesus Christ descends to earth once more to perform an act of self-destruction, thereby desacralising the process of sin and repentance and turning it into a game. Death, which became the main engine and trigger in the film, like pressing an elevator button, changes the hero’s state from death to life and back, coexisting in harmony with reality. In 2006, after its first screening in cinemas, the film was withdrawn from the repertoire on the pretext of offending religious feelings, and for a long time became part of underground film culture.
The film Jesus from Lithuania completes the cycle of Death and Resurrection, and in 2009, Karolis Jankus began the social and cultural research The Lithuanian Revolution. The main factor that prompted the launch of this research was the 2009 mass riots at the Parliament House, which the author happened to be at the epicentre of while accidentally filming the video documentation. The FB page was founded, where a new short film with a new relevant history was hosted weekly, and received a lot of resonance in various layers of society. During the research, which lasted until 2013, 66 short films were produced, micro-revolutions or micro protest gospels were later combined into a 9-hour poem The Silent Lithuanian Revolution.
In 2020, with the start of the pandemic, Karolis Jankus began his post-apocalyptic research, Biological Loneliness, on the first day of quarantine, with a video camera documenting the changes in human behaviour in the deserted cities of Barcelona and Vilnius. The 56 short films created about each day of the quarantine were posted on social media. Using static video fixation, Jankus creates the atmosphere of dead cities by asking the citizens he meets to freeze in front of the camera for a few minutes. Figures and portraits of fossilised people doing nothing become like final farewell scenes to humanity, or a census of the last survivors of a pandemic by a surviving employee of a statistics department. This research on human behaviour and new habits later developed into an hour-long experimental documentary Biological Loneliness, which has received special attention at experimental, independent film festivals in India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
Since 2024, Jankus has been working according to the rules of the Vrai Cinema Manifesto. The main purpose of the True Cinema Manifesto is to make a film cleaned from the rules invented by the film industry, which has nothing artificial and fictional that is alive and constantly changing, which everyone involved in the process. As a result, by abandoning the technical constraints and the interruptions of time, Vrai Cinema becomes more than a technically told story, but a true work of cinematic poetry.
Vrai Cinema film No.1 Chagrin, an experimental film made in 2025, is the first film to follow the rules of the Vrai Cinema manifesto. The film is created with an unprecedented system where the filmmaking process becomes the film’s main idea and plot. During the filming, the actors and cinematographers became real creators of the film rather than performers. Mysteriously, by giving the actors absolute freedom, the process of creating the film did not break down into uncontrolled anarchy, but turned into a drama-comedy with a strange, complicated plot. Sometimes a film leaves the frame of traditional cinema and becomes a contemporary work of art.
A. Ribera
Ils Vous Baisent Les Mains, 1997.
Vrai Cinema film No.1 Chagrin, 2025.
Vrai Cinema film No.1 Chagrin, 2025.
Vrai Cinema film No.1 Chagrin, 2025.
Vrai Cinema film No.1 Chagrin, 2025.
Films & Media Festivals
Twilight Tokyo Film Festival – TTFF, Tokyo, Best Experimental Film, 2023;
Tokyo Film Awards, Tokyo, Best Feature Documentary, 2022;
Indie Doc Pro Film Festival, Barcelona, Best Feature Documentary, 2023;
Calcutta International Cult Film Festival, Calcutta, India, Best Experimental Film, 2021;
Valencia Indie Film Festival, Valencia, Official Selection,2021;
Varese International Film Festival, Varese, Italy, Best Documentary Film, 2022;
Boden International Film Festival, Boden, Sweden, Semifinalist, 2021;
Independent-Star Filmfest, Freising, Bavaria, Official Selection, 2022;
Luis Buñuel Memorial Awards, Kolkata, Best Experimental Film, 2021;
Tagore International Film Festival, Bolpur, India, Best Experimental Film, 2021;
Royal Society of Television&Motion Picture Awards, Kolkata, Best Experimental Film, 2022;
New York Istanbul Short Film Festival, New York, Best Documentary Film, 2022;
Paris Cinema Awards, Paris, Best LGBT Film, 2022;
Star International Film Festival, Firenze, Italy, Best Feature Documentary, 2023;
Tokyo International Short Film Festival, Tokyo, Best Experimental Film, 2022;
Madrid International Short Film Festival, Madrid, Best Experimental Film, 2023;
Golden Lion International Film Festival, Kolkata, Best Covid Feature Film, 2023;
Seoul International Short Film Festival, Seoul, Official Selection, 2023;
Black Swan International Film Festival, Kolkata, Best Cinematography, 2021;
Milan Gold Awards, Milan, Silver Award for Best Experimental Film, 2021;
Uruvati International Film Festival, Tamil Nadu, India, Best Experimental Film, 2021;
17th Stuttgarter Filmwinter International Festival For Expanded Media, Stuttgart, In competition, 2004;
14th International Bochumer Videofestival, Bochum, In competition, 2004;
8th Friesland Media Art Festival, Leeuwarden, Friesland, In competition, 2004;
Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Lausanne, In competition, 2004;
11th Regensburg Short Film Week, Regensburg, In competition, 2004;
4th International Izmir Short Film Festival, Izmir, Ankara, In competition, 2003;
13th DaKINO International Film Festival, Bucharest, In competition, 2003;
16th Festival De Cinema De Girona, Girona, In competition, 2003;
SITGES 36th Annual International Film Festival of Catalonia, In competition, 2003;
11th Granada Festival International De JOVENES REALIZADORES, Granada, In competition, 2003;
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS 10th Bristol International Short Film Festival, Bristol, In competition, 2003.
French-Baltic-Nordic Video & Electronic Art Festival Riga’97, Riga, Winner, 1997.
Solo & Group Exhibitions
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg, “THE NEW TEN” Contemporary Art from the 10 new Member Nations of the European Union, July 4 – October 10, 2004;
Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna, “THE NEW TEN” Contemporary Art from the 10 new Member Nations of the European Union, October 28, 2004 – January 16, 2005;
Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, “THE NEW TEN” Contemporary Art from the 10 new Member Nations of the European Union, March 5 – May 8, 2005;
Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Oostende, Ostend, “THE NEW TEN” Contemporary Art from the 10 new Member Nations of the European Union, July 2 – October 2, 2005;
Berlin Art Academy, Berlin, “E.U. positive” Art From the New Europe, Curator: Matthias Flugge, 2004;
Rauma Art Museum, Rauma, Finland, ”Rauma Biennale Balticum 2004 – Talking to me?”, 2004;
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius in cooperation with National Museum of M. K. Čiurlionis, Kaunas, (group) “101.3 KM: competition and cooperation”, 2006;
Contemporary Art Centre (group), Vilnius, ”Lithuanian Art 2000-2010: Ten Years”, 2010;
Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center (group), Vilnius, “From idea to reproduction”, 2009;
Contemporary Art Centre (group), Vilnius, ”2 Show. Young Art from Latvia and Lithuania”, Curator: Kęstutis Kuizinas, 2003-2004;
Contemporary Art Centre (group), Vilnius, “Time to be Young And Time to Grow” 1998;
Contemporary Art Centre (group), Vilnius, “8O%”, Curator: Deimantas Narkevičius, 1997.
Grants
Grant of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1997;
Lithuanian Ministry of Culture scholarship,2001-2003; 2007-2008.
Filmography
Vrai Cinema film No.1 Chagrin/Experimental future/114 min./2025;
Biological Loneliness/Experimental documentary/66 min./2021;
Silent Lithuanian Revolution/Epic documentary/360 min./2013;
Walk to Zion/Music documentary/60 min./2007;
Jesus from Lithuania/Feature film/60 min./2006;
Zevango/Short film/10 min./2005;
No Money No Sex/Short film/8.40 min.2004;
Foxy Sisters/Short film/14 min./2003;
No Comment/Documentary short film/5.35 min./2003;
Dead Body Asks For Help/Short film/3.08 min./2003;
Girl and Bones/Silent short film/4.42 min./2003;
Poor Boy/Short film/3.11 min./2003;
Ils Vous Baisent Les Mains/Experimental documentary/30 min./1997;
All Very Decent People/Experimental film/27 min./1997.
Honors and Special awards
Honorary awardee :Experimental, Jean-Luc Godard Award presented by Cult Critic, The Film Magazine, Kolkata, 2021;
Honorable mention: Experimental, Paris Film Awards, Paris, 2021;
Honorable mention: Experimental, London Movie Awards, London, 2021;
Memorable award: 6th International Panorama of Independent Filmmakers of Film & Video, Thessoloniki, 2004;
Special prize: French-Baltic-Nordic Video & Electronic Art Festival Riga’97, Riga, 1997.
Performance
Performance (inspired by Rene Magritte): The Menaced Assassin, Hegel’s Holiday, Gallery Langas, Vilnius, 1993.06.01;
Perfomance: Water-Human-Sand/Sea-Human-Coast, Gallery Arka, Vilnius, 1992.12.02;