Borderline (Siena) had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, 20 Nov 2025
In the waterways of Lithuania’s Nemunas Delta bordering the Baltic Sea to the west and the Kaliningrad Oblast to the south, ornithologist Vilius (Šarūnas Zenkevičius) monitors the populations of migratory birds and sometimes ventures out at night to rescue them from poachers’ traps. He is also a broken man, left with the memories of his wife Jurate who drowned herself, and with the care of their adolescent daughter Urtė (Urtė Povilauskaitė) who is mute and lives in her own autistic headspace. Local woman Elena (Eglė Mikulionytė) helps out around the house, but grudgingly and only out of a sense of duty towards Jurate. Money is tight, and Urtė is compulsively destroying the interior of their home, literally scraping the surface of the walls away with a nail. The ruin in this household is coming from within – or maybe the family is just rebuilding itself in unconventional ways.
The boundary to which the title of writer/director Ignas Jonyas’ Borderline (Siena) refers is both a literal one, and also something more metaphorical. After all, Vilius – isolated, impoverished, and conflicted in his feelings about his unresponsive daughter and indeed himself – is contemplating following his wife to the other side, and so acts in increasingly irresponsible and self-destructive ways. This will bring him into collision with a gang of Russian smugglers, whose formidable leader Vanda (Danguolė Beinarytė) recognises that Vilius’ boat, his bird monitoring devices and his knowledge of the waters are all useful assets for their criminal operation – and so Vilnius is now crossing a moral line too. While this, at least for now, helps solve his financial problems, he is messing with dangerous people, and Vanda is not one to be crossed.
Borderline is a taut, noirish thriller, complete with chases, treachery, murder, and in the character of large, limping Vanda, a very unusual femme fatale. Yet the film also smuggles in a sensitive portrait of someone drowning in grief and guilt, and a story of parents and children (“the things you would do for them”, as Vanda says to Vilius, referring to her status as a mother with two sons). In fact the film’s most touching and wondrous scene, almost a moment of magical realism, comes when Vilius – who has thus far treated his daughter more like an ornament than a person – gets down on the floor to see for the first time, from Urtė’s own very specific perspective, the world that she has created for herself, and so, in recognising in Urtė her late mother’s artistic eye, learns to love her again for who she is.
The wintry wetlands are shot with austere beauty by DP Audrius Budrys, who likes to give us a bird’s eye view on these grounded dramas, and to emphasise the possibility of looking in different ways. Meanwhile Vilius does test boundaries. He flirts with death, engages in criminality, and takes his boat into forbidden waters. Yet the question that Borderline poses is whether, after dipping his toes into all these acts of transgression, it is really possible for Vilius, desperate, damaged and lost, to come back, to find his way home and to reconnect with his daughter.
strap: Ignas Jonyas’ father-daughter frontierlands noir sets a grieving ornithologist among a ruthless gang of smugglers
© Anton Bitel
