E/RASED WORLDS

It is very difficult to keep the line between past and present. Sometimes the past does not vanish – it remains latent, haunting the margins of the present, a memory that refuses to fade. In the summer of 1990, as the Soviet empire unraveled and Lithuania reclaimed its sovereignty, a group of young artists set out on a one-day journey into the unknown: the Kaliningrad region, Russia —once East Prussia. They documented what they could: the ruins of a cultural geography in erasure, a silence already growing louder. The footage from that journey vanished during the Soviet military assault on the Lithuanian media center in January 1991. The building was stormed, the crew displaced, and the material presumed lost. Three decades later, the forgotten tapes resurfaced—aged but intact. Alongside them emerged the photographs of Raimundas Urbonas, one of the travelers, whose images captured a fragile world on the brink of disappearance. My friend, Raimundas died under mysterious circumstances during storm “Anatol” in Klaipėda, Lithuania in 1999. Officially, he drowned in a river near the sea. Unofficially—questions remain. His sudden death left only images behind, echoing the loss of the world he sought to preserve. Today, as Europe once again faces war and Russia reverberates with renewed militarization, those archival materials gain chilling relevance. E/rased Worlds is an excavation of personal memory. It is an essay-film about borders—both geopolitical and emotional—and the fragile threshold where history and landscape converge. An erased world flickers back into view.