Photo: J. Krivickas

The music band Requiem has prepared a surprise for its fans – on 29 January, the rockers presented their new video clip “Apie ką tau papasakot” (What to tell you about).

While recording this song, the leader of the band Requiem Tomas Krivickas and his comrades realised that this song simply had to have its own visual solution. However, the musicians did not even imagine that it would develop into a large-calibre international project.

With the help of the first Requiem manager Darius Baltušis, the group met Mexican director Roberto Valdes, who has been in the film industry for twenty years. Roberto Valdes began his creative path by creating several video clips and commercials for Mexican artists and participated in the creative team of the film Spectre, which tells the story of the adventures of Agent 007 James Bond (some scenes of this film were filmed in Mexico), and his short film Algien won as many as twelve awards around the world. It was this film that pushed him to continue his career in Europe. Roberto Valdes first arrived in Lithuania in 2017, and since last year he has been living in his beloved country, where he teaches Kauno kolegija Higher Education Institution (HEI) students.

Requiem leader Tomas Krivickas remembers that it didn’t take long to persuade Roberto Valdes – the director immediately got down to work with energy.

The circle of enthusiasts ready to contribute to the production of the video clip expanded rapidly – a group of five people led by director Roberto Valdes and cameraman Mykolas Alekna quickly grew to 35, and later to a hundred – everyone who could and wanted to contributed: the city municipality, the head of the education department Vaidotas Kalinas, the Antanas Smetona and Jonas Basanavičius gymnasiums, the Ukmergė Museum of Local Lore lent authentic instruments from the group Afiša for filming, and police officers lent a helping hand when filming scenes for the video clip on the main street of the city. During the creation of the video clip, Ukmergė and the surroundings of Siesikai Castle turned into a “little Hollywood” for several days.

‘It was a song that I identified with. It doesn’t matter if you understand the words or the meaning, because it’s the emotions that are conveyed. My real intention, when writing this story and the video clip, was to create the emotion that I felt while listening to the song, with an emotion that I can convey through images,’ says director Roberto Valdes, who last year made the feature film The Dream Fisher. By the way, now the director’s thoughts are already turning to a new feature film that will tell the story of the Ninth Fort of Kaunas tragedy.

Tomas Krivickas remembers that the video clip was filmed in late, gloomy and cold autumn: ‘We chose one of the worst times of the year to film the clip in nature. It’s late autumn, when there are really few colours, and the leaves have fallen. But still – that Lithuania is so beautiful and colourful, unreal. Even at the worst time of the year, when people are depressed, those images still shocked me, how beautiful they are.’

The first to get acquainted with this new work were the residents of Requiem’s hometown of Ukmergė – the creative team and musicians of the video clip organized a special evening at the Ukmergė Cultural Centre, where they shared impressions from the filming set and recalled many stories that happened on stage and behind the scenes.

Read the full article on delfi.lt (in Lithuanian)
Photo: Tauras Gūdmantas