How ‘The Southern Chronicles’ Team Created 1990s Lithuania on Film: ‘We Pressed the Rock and Roll Button’

After the release of “The Southern Chronicles,” producer Lukas Trimonis couldn’t quite believe the amount of attention the film was receiving in his home country of Lithuania.

“When we received the box office admission results of the first weekend, I had to call our distributor and ask them if there was a mistake,” said Trimonis in a Variety Screening Series conversation moderated by Variety’s Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay. “I also spoke with my mom and she asked [about] how many people saw it on the [opening] weekend. We said 90,000, and she said, ‘Did all the people fit in?’ We are a country of 2.9 million, and the film was seen by 412,000 people, so percentage wise, it’s one fifth of the population.”

“The Southern Chronicles” follows the story of Rimantas (Džiugas Grinys), a 17-year-old living against the backdrop of Lithuania’s re-independence. As a free-spirited teenager who is interested in…