Romas Zabarauskas’ beautifully understated film, The Writer, is about personal history, choices, the ripples we create and the need for healing as we grow older and our future becomes shorter. The Writer is available to stream now on Dekkoo.
We each build our personal history based on our experiences and the choices we have made along the way. Over time, our version of events solidifies in our minds. But as we get older, we often question whether the memories we hold dear are real or self-created fiction designed to protect us from the reality of a particular situation. Sometimes, it is not until the people who helped form those memories walk back into our lives that the truth of our history and choices finds resolution.
Romas Zabarauskas’ beautifully understated film, The Writer, is about personal history, choices, the ripples we create and the need for healing as we grow older and our future becomes shorter. It is the story of two former lovers who meet again after decades apart, each challenging the other’s memories in a dance of love and reconciliation.
Kostas (Bruce Ross) is a Lithuanian-American writer who has called New York his home since leaving Lithuania in the 90s. He has had a successful career in America, lecturing at universities while writing multiple bestsellers, many of which have centred on his life in Lithuania, the fall of Soviet Russia and his time in the armed forces during his early life. Kostas is very much a part of New York, and the city’s colours, sounds, and diversity run through his blood, political views, and writing. Yet he also feels separate from it, his immigrant status very much felt, even after all these years.
In a small coffee shop a stone’s throw from his apartment, Kostas is about to reconnect with the younger version of himself he left behind in Lithuania so many decades ago, as his former lover, Dima, sits opposite him. Dima (Jamie Day) is a Russian-Lithuanian who fled his home in Russia to be with Kostas in Lithuania in the 1980s, believing their love would last forever after they met in the army. But that love ended when Lithuania gained independence in the 1990s, and Kostas left to study in New York. After so many years, the reason for their meeting is a new book by Kostas that explores their separation as the Iron Curtain fell. But are Kostas’ memories, now printed for all to read, the same as Dima’s?
Co-written with Marc David Jacobs, Anastasia Sosunova, and Arturas Tereskinas, Romas Zabarauskas takes us from the hustle and bustle of a busy New York coffee shop to Kosta’s quiet inner-city apartment, as both men find reconnection through memory while challenging each other’s self-formed histories through reflections. As they cook, eat and drink wine, their conversations weave through politics, the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, belief, capitalism, communism, displacement and immigration. But they avoid the one topic that both men need to discuss: their love, their separation and the decades in between.
As dusk turns to night and wine turns to water, Kostas and Dima will face the truth of their past and the tender love they forged in youth, which neither of them has escaped. It’s a love worn by time, scarred by choices, and damaged by memories. This may make The Writer sound like a schmaltzy romantic drama. However, at its heart, its discussions on reconciliation, memory (shared and individual), and the complexities of cultural identity are urgent and timely, as Kostas and Dima explore displacement, immigration, political ideology, and the decision to stay, leave, run, or hide.
These themes are even more pressing given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Putin’s clear desire to re-create a long-dead Soviet empire. And given recent developments in the United States of America regarding immigration and asylum, The Writer’s geopolitical discussions stretch far beyond Eastern Europe. Do Kosta and Dima rediscover their love through honesty, touch and conversation during a single day? Maybe, but there is still an ocean between them and many unscalable walls in their path, both internal and external in nature.
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