After the team failed to qualify for the games and some of its members ended their professional sports careers, the film’s focus shifted from results on the court to life beyond it.
This summer in Vilnius, one of the most unusual episodes of the upcoming film was shot – the Lithuanian goalball team played outdoors for the first time specifically for the filming.
At the Good Hope Stadium, the usual silence of the indoor hall, the walls, and familiar acoustics were replaced by the city’s hum, the wind, and open space. For the director, this experiment became not only an opportunity to seek a new visual language for the film but also a kind of metaphor for the athletes’ life stage – leaving the familiar professional sports environment for a world where they have to find their place anew.
We talk with director Andrius Lekavičius about the story that turned from a sports film into a human portrait, the attempt to “translate” the world of the visually impaired for a sighted audience in cinema, goalball under the open Vilnius sky, and the boundary between the documentary maker and his heroes.
– You have been creating „Catching gold in the dark“ for several years. How similar is today’s film to the one you imagined the first time you pointed the camera at the Lithuanian goalball team? What has changed the original direction of the film the most during this time?
– At first, I had very clear time frames – the Olympic cycle. The Lithuanian team’s path to the Paris Paralympics and at the end of that path – winning Olympic medals. That was the ideal original scenario. But documentary filmmaking is an unpredictable process: the initial idea changes and leads somewhere else. On the way to the Paralympics, the Lithuanian team stumbled at the last step – they lost in the European Championship final and for the first time in this millennium did not qualify for the games. That defeat strongly changed the original idea but opened a deeper story.
That defeat strongly changed the original idea but opened a deeper story.
While filming, I realized that a visually impaired athlete dedicates two hours a day to sports, and the rest of the day his daily challenges are often even greater than in sports. It became more of a social portrait of a professional disabled athlete. At the same time, some team players ended their sports careers, which finally turned the film from sports towards the human. Paradoxically, today’s film, although completely different from the original plan, is much closer to what attracted me from the very beginning.
– The Lithuanian goalball team played outdoors for the first time this summer specifically for the filming. Where did the idea to take goalball out of its usual indoor space come from, and why did you choose the Good Hope Stadium in Vilnius for this?
– Goalball is the only Paralympic sport not adapted from able-bodied sports but created specifically for people with visual impairments. And goalball lives in a kind of vacuum. The hall, silence, walls that reflect sound – this is the map of their world. I was curious to see what happens when you open that vacuum. It is an experiment that fits the new vision of the film: the end of a career is also leaving the hall where you know everything and entering an open space with more external noise.
At the same time, it is a cinematographic experiment – together with cinematographer Adomas Jablonskis, we are still searching for the right visual language for the film, trying different cameras and movements. We want to show goalball unusually and interestingly – we filmed the outdoor game without infrared filters on the cameras, so the visible colors are different from usual filming. And the Good Hope Stadium was logistically suitable – next to the Good Hope primary school where the goalball players train, and in the afternoon it is beautifully lit by the sun.
– For goalball players, sound on the court replaces what vision provides in other sports. What happens to the game when the hall walls and familiar acoustics disappear, and city sounds, wind, and a large open space appear around?
– Since I did not play myself and only observed from the side, I can say there were significantly more goals than usual. After the game, the goalball players unanimously repeated: “Strange.” And this is where their phenomenal ability to adapt is revealed – what has fascinated me since the first day of filming.
Although confused in the first minutes, they begin to “read” the space and tame it: they turn off the city hum, concentrate on the sounds on the grass. I understood a simple truth: the world of the blind is built from echoes. Take away the walls – and they rebuild it from what remains.
I understood a simple truth: the world of the blind is built from echoes.
– Cinema is essentially based on images, and you are making a film about people whose relationship with the world is primarily not visual. Did making this film require you to rethink what images can tell in cinema at all – and what they cannot?
– Yes, and that reflection became the engine of the film. From the very beginning, we revolve around the question: how to film what cannot be seen? Cinema is a visual medium, and my heroes’ world is one of sensations, sounds, touches. The image can show the surface: the body, a fall, a scar. But it cannot show darkness from the inside. Therefore, the image in this film ceases to be omnipotent and becomes a translator.
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On the goalball court – a static camera and slow-motion shots where the falls and throws of the goalball players turn into a kind of ballet: this way, the image reveals what the naked eye would not see. In everyday life – a “breathing” camera conveying the chaos of the environment you do not see. And where the image ends, sound begins – it will guide the viewer through the film just as it guides my hero through life.
– In the black-and-white freeze frames of the film, the familiar space of Vilnius becomes almost unrecognizable. What role will such a visual language play in the film? Are you trying to bring the viewer closer to how the film’s heroes experience the environment, or are you consciously avoiding imitating the experience of the blind?
– I do not want to imitate the experience of the blind because even a successful imitation will remain just an imitation. I cannot “give blindness” to a sighted viewer by turning off the image or turning the screen into a black rectangle: blindness is not a turned-off screen; it is a differently functioning world.
The black-and-white, “altered” space of Vilnius is not an imitation for me but a translation. When you take away the usual colors from a familiar space, the viewer momentarily loses certainty – no longer knows and must rely on something else: intuition, sound, rhythm. That brief disorientation in a familiar place is as close as we can honestly bring a sighted person to the daily life of the film’s heroes. I want to show not what they see – because the answer would be “nothing” – but how the world feels when you assemble it from sounds and memory.
I want to show not what they see – because the answer would be “nothing” – but how the world feels when you assemble it from sounds and memory.
– You have said that the goalball players quite easily let the camera into the locker room from the very beginning. However, the camera has been with them for several years now. How has your relationship changed during that time, and was there a moment when you realized that they no longer behave in front of the camera as “film heroes”?
– I myself was surprised by how willingly we were let in – I have filmed the Lithuanian basketball team and know how much the locker room avoids cameras and outside eyes. But here, from the very beginning, we were like a fly on the wall. But the most interesting thing is that the basis of our relationship is not visual – they do not see the camera.
They hear me and the operator Adomas: our footsteps, breathing, voice, how we move in the space. There were several turning points. The first – when the team’s “teasing” started flying not past us but at us: when you become the target of mockery, you know you are one of them. We had to get used to the remarks about the constantly rewritten film script.
– In sports documentaries, it is very easy to build a story on a classic formula – training, obstacles, important competitions, victory or defeat. Your heroes’ lives seem much broader than the scoreboard. How do you try not to confine them to a comfortable narrative about “people overcoming disability”?
– The simplest answer is that this film is only halfway done, where sports films usually end. We try to show the transformation when professional blind athletes end their careers and what they live for afterward. The film’s heroes are not symbols. They are people with great, sharp humor, with weaknesses, with pains, with wives and children without whom they would not come to training.
I hope the film will challenge viewers to reconsider the limits of ability and the usual lines drawn by society between the disabled and the able-bodied. The film aims to erase these invisible lines by presenting people who daily redraw the boundaries of human possibilities through their activities.
I hope the film will challenge viewers to reconsider the limits of ability and the usual lines drawn by society between the disabled and the able-bodied
– You mentioned that without the support of the Vilnius Film Fund, this outdoor filming probably would not have happened. What did it allow you to do creatively – is there a specific shot, scene, or idea that simply would not be in the film without this support?
– Very specifically: goalball outdoors in the stadium – those scenes simply would not exist without this support. Such an experiment is not “we came and filmed”: you need to prepare the court, goals, lines to ensure the game is played safely.
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– Thank you for the conversation!
