Lithuanian Oscar contender ‘The Chronicles of the South’ appears to have been made in the 1990s

Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in March 1990, becoming the first former Soviet republic to do so. Its film industry has made waves in recent years on the film festival circuit with social dramas, gangster thrillers and eccentric slice-of-life films. But its nomination for the 2026 Oscar for Best International Feature Film takes us back to the early days of independence.

If you’re craving period outfits, ’90s design, and a soundtrack full of Eurodance classics, from Culture Beat’s “Mr. Vain” to Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam,” Ignas Miškinis’ The Chronicles of the South (Chronicle of the South) has you covered. Want to watch a coming-of-age story? Once again, this one is for you. The same is true if you want to get a glimpse of some of Lithuania’s emerging actors, or if you’re just curious about what the highest-grossing Lithuanian film of all time looks like.

Oh, and it won the Baltic competition at the 2024 Tallinn Dark Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) and 12 awards from 14 nominations at the 2025 Lithuanian Silver Crane Awards, including for Best Feature Film and Best Director.

Adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by Rimantas Kmita, the film follows the story of Rimantas, a 17-year-old who grew up in Lithuania in the 1990s. Although he is more interested in rugby, music and street life, his meeting with Monika, from a more bourgeois family, opens him up to literature, culture and another way of seeing the world. The screenplay is by Eglė Vertelytė. The cast includes Džiugas Grinys, selected among the 2024 European Shooting Stars at the Berlinale, and Robertas Petraitis, who stars this year in the dark thriller PÖFF. The activistDigna Kulionytė and Irena Sikorskytė, among others.

The Chronicles of the South brings to the screen a mix of nostalgia and 1990s angst. Miškinis remembers being unsure when he was asked to direct the project. “I felt like we were a little late for the ’90s,” he says. THR. “And I didn’t want to make a film with a point of view from our times. I was trying to avoid any distance. My vision was not to make a film about 1994 but to make a film that looks like it was made in 1994.”

The director was himself a teenager at the time. “We didn’t have YouTube or Facebook, but we did have MTV,” he recalls. “MTV was still music television in 1994, so my idea was to use the media, the tools of the ’90s rather than any superficial technical equipment. The budget wasn’t that huge either, so everything was like the ’90s. But the reason I chose 16-millimeter film and VHS cameras was part of my vision that it wasn’t a movie about the ’90s, but it had to be a movie about the ’90s.”

Licensed songs for The Chronicles of the South were not quite to his taste at the time. “I was more of a headbanger with long hair and I hated those Culture Beats, Snaps or whatever,” says Miškinis. THR. “It wasn’t my music at all. Even Metallica was too soft for me.”

But the director and the rest of the creative team agreed to take off their expert and critical hats. “We began to imagine that we were hearing [Metallica’s] “Nothing Else Matters” or “Mr. Vain’ for the first time,” he said. “It was very interesting and funny.”

The film is set and filmed in Šiauliai, “the rugby capital of Lithuania,” explains Miškinis. How was filming the rugby scenes? Technically, rugby is difficult to shoot, because there are a lot of people in a scene, and we were trying to build an authentic story, so we thought everyone should play, not act,” the director recalls. “The concert scenes where we had a live performance and at the same time we saw the main narration with our actors involved were also difficult.”

But in terms of rehearsals rather than technical challenges, small scenes can also cause a lot of work. Miškinis notes: “You could perhaps say that nothing happens, but that’s when chemistry is created between the actors.”

So, is the director looking back with nostalgia to the 1990s in Lithuania? Far from it. “For me, the 90s were the most horrible period of my life,” he says. THR. “Not just for me, for my whole generation. We got independence. I hate the word ‘post-Soviet’. It means you’re maybe still a little bit Soviet. But that time was so dark for me, because I was a teenager, and there was so much corruption, crime, everything. It was like the wild, wild East, crazy times.

He even once tried to write a screenplay about this period, “and it was far from being a comedy,” says Miškinis. “So when I first got the offer to do The Chronicles of the Southmy reaction was no, I don’t want to make a comedy about that era. Go away! But when we started developing it, I realized maybe that was my problem. And maybe this is a way of talking about that era that will be easier for me and for the audience to look at it with a little smile on our face and laugh at ourselves and the ’90s.”

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