Gabrielė Urbonaitė is one of the young Lithuanian filmmakers who have been taking the festival circuit by storm in recent years. So far, she has mostly made a name for herself as an editor, for example on Austeja Urbaite’s Remember to Blink. But this summer, she has been presenting to festival audiences her feature directorial debut Renovation, which she also wrote.
It world premiered in the Proxima Competition lineup of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and just screened at the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival.
The movie, starring Žygimante Elena Jakštaitė (European Shooting Star 2021), Šarūnas Zenkevičius (European Shooting Star 2025) and up-and-coming Ukrainian talent Roman Lutskyi (Under the Volcano by Damian Kocur, 2024), explores the pressures on a young woman to be settled and successful by the time she turns 30. The film’s cinematographer is Urbonaitė’s friend, the prolific Lithuanian camera wizard Vytautas Katkus.
Renovation was produced by Uljana Kim for Lithuania’s Studio Uljana Kim, Latvia’s Mima Films and Belgium’s Harald House. It is supported by the Lithuanian Film Center, the National Film Centre of Latvia, and LRT.
Ilona, a perfectionist 29-year-old, lives in present-day Vilnius, Lithuania. “At this turning point in her life, she begins to question how she truly wants to live,” notes a synopsis for Renovation. “She moves into a seemingly perfect apartment with her boyfriend Matas, with whom things are getting serious.” But as the building’s renovation begins, Ilona’s inner doubts also start to surface. “She strikes up an unexpected friendship with Oleg, a Ukrainian construction worker. After spontaneously telling him she’s a poet, she actually begins to write poetry.”
Things threaten to get out of control. “Their connection deepens her uncertainty,” highlights the synopsis. “Does she really want to settle down and start a family?”
On the sidelines of the Sarajevo festival, Urbonaitė, who earned her BFA in Film from Emerson College and her MFA in Screenwriting/Directing from Columbia University, talked to THR about real-life inspirations for Renovation, her cinematic voice, the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Lithuanians, and what she hopes to do next.
Can you tell me a bit about the inspirations for your film?
Yeah, it came from my own experience, but also that of my friends. We all kind of felt the same way about approaching 30. I was living in the States when I started writing, and I noticed a difference between my friends at home and my American friends and my peers in the West. I think that the pressure that we associate with turning 30, we experience that even earlier. And I think it’s cultural, it comes from our parents and their generation and the way they were raised. The actress Žygimante, who plays Ilona, also added some of her experience.
Why did you move back to Lithuania?
I always planned to move back. The pandemic kind of accelerated the process a little bit. But I always wanted to tell stories in Lithuania. I also kept making short films in Lithuania while I was studying in the U.S. It just feels really important to me to be a part of this growing film industry and Lithuanian stories. They are or can be universal, but, for me, it’s important to somehow transmit this specific cultural experience.
The war in Ukraine is a constant threat, mostly in the background, in Renovation. Can you share a bit about how that affects life in Lithuania?
You are mentioning a good point. When I started writing the script, I really wanted it to be about small things, about small dramas of everyday life that people face. And then when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, I felt like it shifted my perspective. And I couldn’t focus only on these small things. Of course, the war keeps going on, and people still have to lead their lives, and you do end up worrying about your relationships and your ambitions and all that, right? But there’s also that larger problem, and, I think, all of us in Lithuania feel this anxiety related to it, because there is a threat. Sometimes it feels bigger, sometimes it feels smaller.
It’s hard to say what’s going to happen. But we feel this anxiety about the war being nearby, and we feel a lot of empathy towards Ukrainians because of our shared history. So it felt important for me to reflect that. I kind of see the world, or life in Lithuania, as before the invasion and after – for me, it changed that much.
And especially since I’m a featuring Ukrainian character, I could not ignore it, and I wouldn’t want to ignore it either way. It’s important to reflect this time, this moment. It took me several months of rewriting to kind of understand the main questions that preoccupied my mind. I considered, up until the shooting, how to really portray it to do it justice, but so it doesn’t overtake the main story.
Did you always plan Oleg to be a Ukrainian construction worker or did you make him Ukrainian after the invasion of Ukraine?
He was Ukrainian from the beginning. Six-plus years ago, the three main characters came to me kind of instantly and together. He was Ukrainian, because the apartment building that I live in in Vilnius underwent this renovation, and the construction workers were from Ukraine and Belarus. That was just a reality.
How did you find the three actors?
They’re all professional actors. With Šarūnas Zenkevičius, who plays Matas, we have been working together for 10 years now, we did a couple shorts together. And Roman Lutskyi, who plays Oleg, I saw in [2021 Ukrainian movie] Reflection by Valentyn Vasyanovych, and that was quite magical. I just saw his performance in that film, and I knew he was Oleg, even though it’s a very different role and a very different film. Roman read the treatment only and agreed to do it. And when we first Zoomed, for me, it wasn’t even a casting. I knew I wanted to work with him, and he really seemed like a match. I’ve never before experienced an actor and a character being so close in my mind.
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This is so funny because I said, oh, did they somehow all, like, have such innate charisma somehow, you know, like, like without, because I think sometimes, like, especially young, young actors, sometimes you can tell, oh, they’re trying too hard. And I was like, Oh, they just somehow I care, and I want them all to be okay, you know, give them a hug, or, like, a high five or something, it but all in a slightly different way. So this is kind of like that they had, that they all had, like, this level of, oh, I care, you know, and they worked off each other so nicely that I was like, Oh yeah, I can see there’s chemistry here, there’s chemistry there, and there’s love there,
They’re all very talented actors, but we also spend a lot of time, especially with Žygimante and Šarūnas, working on the script together, talking a lot about the characters, and meeting up for walks around the lake, just spending time together. Because development took a while, we just used that time to kind of bond. And then we rehearsed for a while too, because we shot on film.
Quite a lot of scenes play out indoors. How did you find shooting so much in an apartment, which, I assume, comes with some limitations?
It was one of the challenges, for sure. The key was to find the right apartment, one that would be an interesting space in itself. I wanted it to be a Soviet-era apartment building, but it had to be different and unique, so that these people would want to move in. And that’s exactly what we found. And then, Vytautas and I, decided to find one angle for each scene, and how to combine a handheld camera with a tripod. So, I knew that the film set would basically be one apartmen, which was the frame I had to work within, and then you have to look for those solutions and angles.
We also talked a lot about how to shoot it simply, but not conventionally. That was my concept. I don’t like a very pretentious camera, or a formalistic camera. I like simplicity in cinema, but in a way that it is not boring and conventional.
Tell me a bit about renovation as an actual construction site but also a metaphor for the construction sites of one’s life – and as the film’s titles.
Draft one was just to mark the action of renovating the building. But the metaphor, I guess, evolved with the script and the characters. And, yeah, I like having double meanings, yeah. And I like one-word titles.
How much or little did you want to make the film about post-Soviet trauma?
I remember the first drafts of the script. I had this professor at Columbia who knows Eastern European film well, and he read my script, and he was like: “Finally, a film from Eastern Europe that’s not about trauma.” But then, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, I realized we are all traumatized, whether we like it or not, whether we can admit it or not. These are transgenerational traumas, and it’s about understanding how your parents and grandparents suffered. So that’s not in the foreground in the film, but it is somewhere in the background. I realized I shouldn’t shy away from this trauma.
Do you already have an idea for your next movie, and will we see you write and direct more features?
I really enjoyed this process, so I definitely want to do more. I’m currently also making a personal documentary about art and family. I come from a family of artists, so I’m diving into this theme of how art and family can co-exist.