Dir: Kristijonas Vildžiūnas | Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia 2026 | 88´
Vilis (55), a scholar of Asian Studies, finds himself trapped inside the CUBE, a mysterious, elevator-like structure. When the CUBE flips, he hits his head and loses all sense of who he is. An intercom instructs him to leave through the red door and find the green door outside.
The red door leads Vilis into Vilnius, brought to a standstill by the 2020 pandemic. There, he encounters his wife and three adult children — two daughters and a son — yet feels like a stranger within his own family. His children are not surprised. Their father has long since disappeared into his academic bubble, remaining emotionally absent even when physically present.
As Vilis searches aimlessly for the green door, his family begins to fall apart. He turns to the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, the foundation of his academic life, hoping to outsmart the CUBE’s controlling mechanism, the “Dicechingomat”. But the solution proves less intellectual than emotional: only by establishing a genuine connection with his children can Vilis find the green door.
Kristijonas Vildžiūnas transforms this surreal premise into an offbeat family drama about isolation, emotional absence and the limits of intellect. The CUBE gives physical form to the emotional enclosure Vilis has built around himself: its sealed, shifting interior traps him in the same self-contained system that has kept him apart from his family. Outside, pandemic-era Vilnius extends that condition into the wider world, its emptied streets and suspended routines turning social isolation into a visible landscape.
The city’s enforced separation therefore mirrors Vilis’s voluntary withdrawal, while the CUBE exposes its consequences in concentrated form. What begins as a mysterious science-fiction puzzle gradually becomes a story about a man forced to recognise that escape depends not on decoding the mechanism, but on breaking through the detachment that has made his family feel unreachable.
World premiere: Warsaw International Film Festival / International Competition