Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

A few years ago my elder brother was killed by two men. One of the murderers escaped punishment while the second, who alone took the blame for the crime, was later released from prison for an exemplary behaviour. This made me decide to start a socio-artistic research regarding what “exemplary behaviour” means in the case of a murderer, when and how killers behave exemplarily. In summer 2014 I started to develop feature-length creative documentary “Exemplary Behaviuor”. Logline of the documentary says: The documentary explores the paradox of exemplary behaviour in murderers currently serving life sentences in Vilnius’ Lukišk?s prison and hoping to return to society. “Exemplary Behaviour” is a journey of transformation for the author, the murderers, and society who are searching for tolerance among humans. Now the documentary developed into a big scale socio-artistic transmedia project. “Exemplary Behaviour” is a project that seeks to create an emotionally and visually strong, thoughts provoking spaces that are meant to encourage tolerance to murderers. Tolerantia in Latin means ability to bear hardship, to be patient. Today many Europeans still tend to lack tolerance towards other ethnicities, immigrants, prisoners, unorthodox thinking, etc. In this project, the prisoner becomes a metaphor for “the other”. The main goal is to encourage tolerance of “others”. Video installation “Exemplary Behaviour” is an extended format of the documentary of the same title. It concentrates on a film element called healing sequence. Film’s healing sequences are hypnotic episodes, that are meant to awaken viewers’ imagination and are related to scientific phenomenon called “Prisoner’s Cinema”. Prisoner’s cinema is mainly reported by prisoners kept in dark cells for long periods of time. It’s an experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye. It is a visual hallucination of light created by human brain that tries to compensate for lack of stimuli and the resulting monotony

Audrius Mickevi?ius is a Lithuanian film director, interdisciplinary artist (video art, photography, architecture, installations, graphics, sound, writing), and a professor in the Department of Media Art at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, a guest lecturer in European universities. He completed his architectural sudies in Vilnius (1988) and visual communication studies in Copenhagen (1996). Audrius became obsessed with cinema at a young age. In 1983 he made his first 8 mm film “Requiem for Quartet”. Since then Audrius has made 17 more films. In recent years he created several experimental, documentary, and fiction films, which were screened in various international film festivals and MoMA, New York. Since 2010 the film director has been a member of the Lithuanian Filmmakers Union. He works and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania.