Since 2014, the Critics’ Week sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival has been helping talented short-film directors make the leap to feature films via its Next Step programme. However, since 2019, at the workshop that’s offered each year to the laureates (see the news on the latest intake), there has also been a competition organised to single one of them out as the winner.

This year, it was the Lithuanian project The Visitor by Vytautas Katkus, produced by M-Films, which was crowned as the victor by a jury made up of Thibaut Bracq (of the Atlas Workshops at the Marrakech International Film Festival), Sata Cissokho (Memento International) and Alexis Hofmann (Bac Films).

A director as well as a DoP on several works by young Lithuanian helmers, Vytautas Katkus presented Community Gardens in the Critics’ Week in 2019 and Places at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, and is unveiling Uogos (Cherries) this year, once again in the Critics’ Week.

The Visitor follows Danielus’ journey as the young man makes a new life for himself in a foreign land where he does not speak the language and doesn’t know anyone. As Danielus, an unworldly wanderer, tries to connect with the locals and the places, he cannot escape his loneliness. One day, he meets his ex-girlfriend’s father, a man who has accepted his own lonesomeness, and decides to befriend him.