The Juggler
2018 · 11m · Lithuania
Directed by Skirmanta Jakaitė
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
We fool ourselves that the world is one — a film about the scary, unknown other side of life we never fully grasp.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Jakaitė builds a genuinely disorienting argument about perception and unknowability—the kind of essay film that resists easy consumption, which is exactly why it shouldn't be ignored.
The formal architecture here is what matters: how the film uses fragmentation and tonal shifts to enact the epistemological crisis it's theorizing, placing it squarely in a lineage of structural cinema that uses form as argument.
There's a single cut or transition—likely early in the piece—where the film tips from representing duality into *being* the duality, and that moment of formal commitment is what transforms an interesting premise into something that actually breathes.