Blind Date | MAMA (2013)
Short film, 6:40 min
Award: DIE KLAPPE – International Short Film Festival Hamburg

Blind Date | MAMA marks an early moment in my practice in which the image begins to withdraw and perception emerges as relation — a work where connection forms not through seeing but through presence, rhythm and attention.

The film was shot in a social housing estate in Kaunas, Lithuania, where predominantly blind residents live. Although the environment is specific, the work remains entirely inside the apartment.

There, a blind mother encounters her adult son; the father is blind as well. The son is one of Lithuania’s most renowned dancers — his mother has never seen him. I met him by chance in the snow: his movement appeared lighter, searching, different from the usual certainty of public movement. Only later did I understand that his way of walking grew from dance — and from growing up with blind parents.

While the mother cooks, washes dishes or sits in front of a running colour television that for her consists only of voices and sounds, the son attempts to communicate not through speech but through movement. She orients herself through breathing, steps and bodily proximity; dance becomes language and presence becomes orientation.

The confined space amplifies every movement, every sound and every pause. Closeness produces tenderness as well as friction, and the film observes a moment in which relationship forms without sight — perception conveyed through time, rhythm and the body.

In a renewed atmosphere of political tension across Eastern Europe, the encounter resonates differently today: when seeing separates, listening begins to connect. The film suggests that proximity does not arise from images, but from attention — from the attempt to truly listen.