Karolis Kaupinis Directed ‘Hunger Strike Breakfast,’ Set During the Gorbachov-Ordered Soviet Invasion of Lithuania, Boarded by Alief (EXCLUSIVE)

Alief, the French-U.K. film company, has swooped on worldwide sales rights to Lithuanian Karolis Kaupinis’ “Hunger Strike Breakfast,” his follow-up to debut “Nova Lituania,” Lithuania’s 2021 Oscar entry. 

Receiving its world premiere at the 1-2 Competition of mid-October’s 41st Warsaw Film Festival, “Hunger Strike Breakfast” is produced by Marija Razgutė of M-Films, behind award-winning films “Slow,” at Sundance in 2023 and Vytautas Katkus’ “The Visitor,” which scooped best director at Karlovy Vary this July. The Czech Republic’s Background Films and Latvia’s Tasse Film co-produce.  

Written by Kaupinis, it turns on Daiva (Ineta Stasiulytė), a star TV announcer, launching a hunger strike outside her company, Lithuanian Radio & TV, H.Q., in protest at its occupation by Soviet troops, who had invaded the newly independent Lithuania in Jan. 1991. 

She is joined in a modest trailer by her TV boss (Arvydas Dapšys), fearful of reprisal, a taciturn reader of late night poetry on the network, and a neighbor, a struggling TV actor (Paulius Pinigis) who wants to get away from his family.

In a more conventional political drama, Daiva’s hunger strike would light a fire of popular protest which ousts the Soviet forces. 

Not so here. The protest attracts just two recruits, and Kaupinis, who interviewed the real-life strikers, goes a different way, probing in an intimate drama the often across-the-tracks human connection and self re-discovery found in collective action, however rapidly ignominious its outcome in this case.

This is particularly true of Daiva who comes to ask why she has sunk her life in her job, its fake glamor contrasting not only with drab Vilnius surroundings but her personal sense of culpability and deep desolation.   

“On the surface it was a political fight, but the motivation for it was long suppressed feelings of loneliness, guilt, desire for something big, important, beautiful and warm,”Kaupinus has told Variety.

“During the pandemia and Russian war in Ukraine, it felt like a proper metaphor for my own current Lithuanian society – a tiny makeshift trailer, people on hunger strike, aggressive enemy on one side and indifferent neighbors on the other side,” he added.

“‘Hunger Strike Breakfast’ is ‘just right’ for our times: An engrossing absurdist drama shot in cinéma vérité fashion, that offers a surprising glimpse into the everyday travails of post-communist freedom,” said Brett Walker, president of Alief,  

Alief partner Miguel Govea added that “Hunger Strike Breakfast” is “a sophisticated drama with an atmospheric satirical streak that gradually reminds the audience not to believe in fake news, thus encouraging the fight for our basic freedoms. What is not to love?”

After Warsaw, “Hunger Strike Breakfast” screens in the fiction strand of the Baltic Film Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival where its inclusion has become a statement of independence for the festival after the film incurred the wrath of far-right pro-Russia Nemunas Dawn, part of Lithuania’s ruling coalition. 

“Nemunas Dawn, which is still in the coalition government and shamefully in charge of Culture, has been waging a campaign of disinformation against Lithuanian films, notably against ‘Hunger Strike Breakfast,’ which motivated me even more to include it in our program,” Baltic Film Competition curator Edvinas Pukšta told Variety in late October.

“Hunger Strike Breakfast” also forms part of a powerful Baltic presence at Tallinn of some 40 films, now able to support two Baltic Film Competitions, one fiction, another documentary, with the festival including minority co-productions to underscore the range of Baltic filmmaking. 

In the last few years, other Baltic titles, such as Series Mania winner, TV series “Soviet Jeans,” a Walter Presents pick-up, have begun to re-explore the region’s relatively recent past with, like “Hunger Strike Breakfast” a deeply humanist lens which captures the true sentiments of rebellion against a Soviet establishment.