Miracle

Middle-aged Irena (Eglé Mikulionyté) is the manager of a collective pig farm in a Lithuanian village. The country has just gained its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the transition period leads almost everyone down the path to bankruptcy. Irena is struggling to find a solution to save the farm and the workers’ jobs when a shady American-Lithuanian investor, Bernardas (Vyto Ruginis), appears. He’s willing to buy out the farm and help them, and his presence, together with the hope that he is selling, is immediately welcomed and inevitably changes their lives. Irena, though, believes that there’s something suspicious about him.

„Miracle“ is a subtle, deadpan, tragicomic and almost satirical critique on the abrupt passage from communism to rampant capitalism and the unconventional lust for anything Westernised that the former Soviet republics displayed in the early 1990s. An American entrepreneur is equivalent to the Messiah, whose power no one dares to dispute, and the immediate exposure to capital created an unavoidable status of inequality. Vertelyte observes this horrifying transition of power by using humour as a shield against the bleakness of the atrocities that were perpetrated in the post-Soviet era and are still evident today in Lithuanian society.