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WARSAW 2020

EXCLUSIVE: Trailer for Warsaw title The Jump

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- The documentary helmed by Giedrė Žickytė will world-premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival this Friday

EXCLUSIVE: Trailer for Warsaw title The Jump
The Jump by Giedrė Žickytė

It’s Thanksgiving Day, 1970. The US Coast Guard sets out to meet a Soviet vessel anchored just off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard. A one-day conference between the two nations has been set to discuss fishing rights in the Atlantic Ocean. While the talks are in full swing, Lithuanian sailor Simas Kudirka jumps across the icy water onto the American boat in a frantic bid for freedom. To his horror, and to the outcry of the world media, the Americans return him to the Soviets and he is tried for treason. The event sets off a series of protests throughout the USA begging for his freedom and all hope seems lost, until new information about Simas’s citizenship surfaces.

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Through eyewitness reports, rare archive footage and a dramatic first-person re-enactment by now 90-year-old would-be defector Simas Kudirka, Giedrė Žickytė’s new documentary, The Jump [+see also:
film review
trailer
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, takes us on a stranger-than-fiction journey that became an inspiration for people, pictures and politics, reaching all the way up to the White House.

The film is set to world-premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival this Friday and will later continue its festival journey at Rome and Ji.hlava. The Lithuanian documentarian’s new endeavour follows her work as a producer on Iryna Tsilyk’s festival hit The Earth Is Blue as an Orange [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iryna Tsilyk
film profile
]
(2020), her directorial debut, How We Played the Revolution (2012), and her sophomore film, Master and Tatyana (2015). Meanwhile, Žickytė is currently working on another feature, entitled Masha (see the news).

On this occasion, Žickytė worked with DoP Rimvydas Leipus Lac, composer Kipras Mašanauskas, sound designer Jonas Maksvytis, and editors Thomas Ernst and Danielius Kokanauskis. The project was developed with the support of Eurodoc, and was presented at Baltic Sea Docs (2015), IDFA Forum (2016), Sheffield Doc/Fest MeetMarket (2016) and IFP Film Week (2017).

The Jump was produced by Giedrė Žickytė for Moonmakers (Lithuania) and Uldis Cekulis for VFS Films (Latvia), and co-produced by Catherine Simeon for Faites Un Voeu (France) and Daniel J Chalfen for Naked Edge Films (USA), in association with pubcasters France Télévisions, SVT, YLE, LTV and ERR. Other co-production partners include LRT, WDR, MDR and ViàVosges. Vesna Cudic, Andrius Korvel, Jim Butterworth and Maxime Owyszer served as the project’s executive producers.

Moreover, it received backing from the Lithuanian Film Centre, the Creative Europe programme, the CNC, the National Film Centre of Latvia and the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region, among other sources. Its international sales have been entrusted to MetFilm Sales.

You can watch our exclusive trailer below:

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