COMMON PEOPLE: My Darling Supermarket (Tali Yankelevich, 2019)

The cycle of documentary film screenings Common People initiated by Kaunas Artists’ House (KAH) and Kitas Kinas is back for the third outdoor cinema season! This time at Kaunas culture center terrace (Vytautas avenue 79, Kaunas).

The screening of a film “My Darling Supermarket” (Tali Yankelevich, 2019) will be held at Kaunas Culture Center terrace on August 18th 8:30 p.m.

In the midst of executing extremely repetitive tasks, workers of a supermarket find space to express their doubts and affections, their fears and unlikely dreams. Humor, drama, mystery, romance and quantum physics coexist alongside milk cartons, meat cuts, bar codes and security cameras. Steeped in the confined space of a supermarket, these workers don’t allow their routine to hijack their spirit.

Documentary, Brazil, Denmark, 2019, Portuguese with English and Lithuanian subtitles for deaf or hard of hearing, 80 min.

Director’s statement:

The idea for this film first started to mature in my head a few years back when I was shopping late at night at an almost empty supermarket. As they were about to close I was standing still in a corridor looking bleakly at a pile of products without being able to decide what I wanted to have for dinner. I then overheard two voices a few feet away from me: they were from two young men organizing cereal boxes on the shelves. They were having the most intense and passionate conversation about their first love – I think they were around 18, 19 years old. I quietly observed them as they were doing a very mechanical activity, while having a profound dialogue about the purest form of love. Boxes kept moving up and down.

There was something so cinematic in that moment: the finitude of the material world represented in that corridor, the physicality of the repetitive movement of the guys handling the cereal boxes and the conversation they were having. That lasted only a few minutes before they went back to the stock to get more cereal boxes. I concluded instantly that a supermarket would be a great place to make a film.

Stories can touch us in ways that make us feel more connected to our environment and even to each other. I like to see documentaries as a tool for bringing us more at heart with our own nature as human beings. I feel like I have found something I truly fell in love with in the subject of this film. The supermarket became a wonderful metaphor for talking about our quest as human beings, the limits of our universe; our emotional prisons and our needs for affection and understanding. My ambition with this film is to enable it to completely dissolve the space of the supermarket as a physical boundary – and to create a ballet, a dance of reality full of character, drama and poetry.

Tali Yankelevich is a Brazilian documentary filmmaker and editor based in São Paulo. She holds an honorary Bachelor’s degree in Film & Television and a Masters in Documentary Directing from Edinburgh College of Art. Her first commissioned short, “The Perfect Fit”, about a ballet dancer and a shoemaker, was produced by BBC Scotland, won the SXGlobal short film award at SXSW (2012), and was shortlisted for an Oscar® nomination in 2013. Other works as a director includes a short called “A Girl’s Day” (2014) for the international documentary series “Why Poverty?”, sponsored by The Why Foundation. Her most recent work as an editor is the feature documentary “Cravos”, directed by Marco del Fiol which premiered at the São Paulo International Film Festival. Tali’s documentaries have screened at several renowned film festivals around the world, such as Visions du Reél, Sheffield and Tribeca. My Darling Supermarket is a Brazilian/Danish co-production supported by the Bertha Fund and is her debut feature film.

After every film preview there will be discussions with various experts of different fields of interest. They will be announced soon.

Tickets and discounts: tickets cost €3 (€1,5 concessions – schoolchildren, students, seniors, people with disabilities). Tickets can be purchased at “Tiketa” sales points in person and online. Tickets won’t be available to purchase at the event venue.

Tickets here.

The Common People screening series aims to discuss not only the content of documentary films, but also the whole notion of documentary cinema. The series addresses questions of ethics, directorial decisions. To film or not to film? When does a director cross the line of closeness with their subject? Should documentary cinema reflect ‘reality’ or the vision of its creator? These questions and others are raised and discussed by looking at films who maintain a close look at people telling their own stories: sensitive, creative, eccentric and based somewhere in the margins.

The project is curated by Karolis Žukas (Kitas Kinas) and Edvinas Grinkevičius (Kaunas Artists’ House).

Visual identity: Eglė Simonavičiūtė.

The project is financed by the Lithuanian Film Center, organised by Kaunas Artists’ House. Partners: platform Kitas Kinas, Kaunas Culture Center, Kaunas Deaf Rehabilitation Centre.