During the opening week of Film Fest Gent, I sat down with filmmaker Vytautas Katkus at a local café overlooking the canal. Knowing the Lithuanian-based director traveled far to visit the Belgian festival, I chose a location famous for its view—forgetting it would also mean we had to shout to make ourselves heard each time a boat full of tourists passed by. Still, we managed to order coffee—a double espresso for him, a cappuccino for me—and discuss his films and career.

In recent years, Baltic arthouse cinema has been gaining international acclaim, and Film Fest Gent is among the festivals taking notice—celebrating the movement with a retrospective of Vytautas Katkus’s short films, describing him as “one of the most intriguing voices of his generation.” This is Katkus’s second time at the festival, which he calls one of his favourites. This ranking, he explains, depends on how festivals treat not only their programmes but also their audiences. Invited this year as a jury member as well, he recalls feeling nervous the first time he took on such a role. “It can be hard to find common ground in a room full of opinionated cinephiles,” he says with a smile, though that’s exactly what he now finds most rewarding about jury duty. 

Themes of masculinity and loneliness, of parting with the old and making room for the new, lie at the heart of Katkus’s films. His directorial debut, Community Gardens (2019)—a short film that meditates on the quiet disintegration of a father-son relationship—premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week. Shot with a patient, attentive gaze, the film lingers on gestures and silences more than dialogue, revealing the distance felt in the closest of relationships. 

“We didn’t have much experience,” Katkus describes his small team of friends and collaborators. “And I was very scared in general.” They submitted the film without any expectations; for Katkus, it was enough that someone might just watch it. Since then, he has built a body of work that feels distinctly his own. In shorts such as Places (2020) and Cherries (2022), and now in his first feature film, The Visitor, Katkus continues to explore a kind of post-coming-of-age—stories about adults who are technically all grown up, yet still struggle to define themselves apart from the places they grew up in. In Cherries, a son picks fruit with his father, revisiting the past and ultimately letting each other go. A young man in The Visitor returns to his childhood home to sell it, following his father’s death. Katkus’s world occupies a space between the real and the magical, revealing adulthood as something tender and unfinished. 

Formally trained as a cinematographer, Katkus studied directing by observing the filmmakers he often works with, such as Marija Kavtaradze and Saulius Baradinskas. Through them, he learned how to be present on set—how to communicate, how to sense the atmosphere, and how to control it. What he absorbed is something that’s hard to teach: the rhythm of collaboration. Was it difficult to reverse the roles, to step back and trust another cinematographer with the camera? Katkus nods and smiles.  It can be hard at first, he admits, but he quickly adapted and found his own way of approaching it. For him, collaboration depends on freedom: the cinematographer must be allowed to bring their own sensibility. Together, they search for a shared visual language—a way to speak through images.

With each project, Katkus aims to make the camera less intrusive—less a character and more a portal into the world he wants to show. Ever-present yet meant to be forgotten, his camerawork is reminiscent of observational documentary. He does not romanticise or dwell on details; wide compositions invite us into a world that feels deeply familiar, where the rhythms of everyday life feel tangible. “If it’s minimal and natural, I can focus more on the actors,” he explains. A focus that is essential when serving as both director and cinematographer, roles Katkus has occupied on most of his films. He prefers to work with a smaller crew, which allows him to move freely and adjust intuitively without losing time to technical constraints.

The relationship between father and son runs like a thread through Katkus’s films, most notably in Cherries, where he and his own father are shown picking cherries side by side. With such personal subjects at the core of his work, the line between the fictional and the private can be difficult to navigate. Making Cherries, for instance, Katkus initially imagined a more documentary-like approach: waiting for the fruit-picking season, and letting the crew  film him and his father naturally—how they speak and what is left unsaid. But he quickly realised that there was something more at the heart of his story: a narrative that required structure and deliberate actions. This insight helped him solidify the boundaries between real life and what appears on screen.

Katkus jokingly says he does not engage in psychoanalysis: “In that case, it’s best to see a specialist. I don’t like when a director tells an actor, ‘This part is sad; now you cry.’” Instead, he looks for people who might naturally respond the way their characters would in a given situation. Although his father had appeared as the occasional extra in earlier work, he had never before played such a central role as in Cherries. “He was acting badly, I was acting badly…” Katkus laughs. But they grew more comfortable in front of the camera and learned to stop overthinking, shed self-consciousness, and simply be present. Building on this approach, Katkus prefers to work with friends and acquaintances whose personalities already hold something of the characters they portray. Friends who worry about getting older, for instance, including the one delivering the opening monologue in Cherries, in which she explains how men she finds attractive now call her “madam.” With a set script and clear boundaries, Katkus creates a carefully crafted world—specific characters, a small crew, a distinct atmosphere—where the energy he wants on screen is already present; all he has to do is capture it.

In the closing moments of Cherries, a shift occurs: amid a hyper-realistic, slow-paced film, the son levitates above the cherry trees as his father watches below. “That scene was added just a week before shooting,” Katkus says. “I was afraid the film was becoming too traditional, too proper. I wanted to disrupt that.” This shot became a turning point—a signature gesture of his filmmaking, where realism quietly folds into something impossible yet strangely authentic. Magic is used to make life seem more real. This tension gives his films their fullness—what’s a tragedy without a trace of comedy? In this way, cinema mirrors life itself.

Katkus’s work shows cycles of death and renewal. The recurring images of decay—burning houses, worn-out apartments—suggest a conversation with the past, a reckoning with what must be left behind to make room for what’s to come. This echoes the spirit of post-Soviet Baltic cinema, shaped by shifting cultural and historical ground. Born in the early years of an independent Lithuania, Katkus believes political undercurrents inevitably surface in his work. “You don’t need to talk about politics to make a political film,” he says.

Early in our conversation, I was disarmed by the warmth in his tone of voice. For a filmmaker so assured in his visual language, he speaks with the ease of someone still wondering, still open. As our coffee cups sat empty, it was time for Katkus to head to a meeting at a nearby hotel. Before we parted, I asked one last cliché question: “What advice would you give young filmmakers?” He didn’t mind a cliché outro—he smiled and simply said, “Watch more films.”