Martyna Ratnik. The Screens of Blue Nothingness

Designer Mindaugas Gavrilovas (Studio Cryo)

Your screen turns blue, as the Windows operating system encounters a critical error. What you are now looking at is the passing of the virtual, known as the Blue Screen of Death. Its zeros and ones will always crash in the same way, and, once the issue is resolved, seamlessly return to what has already been.

Five short-form experimental documentaries invite you to pass the digital threshold by entering the realm of blue nothingness. Here, radiation colours 35mm film hidden in fallen leaves (sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, 2015, dir. Tomonari Nishikawa); countrymen prepare for a competition of apocalypse survival (No Foe Can Scare Us, 1978, dir. Edmundas Zubavičius); the fall of an empire mirrors the fall of a friend (May You Live in Interesting Times, 2022, dir. Martyna Ratnik); beavers get to rebuild everything from zilch (CASTOROCENE, 2021, dir. George Finlay Ramsay); and decaying memories captured on an expired film briefly become yet again visible (to forget, 2019, dir. Lydia Nsiah).  .

Gazing at the ends of many different worlds – from the ones that have already happened to those that are only yet to come – the selection presents personal visions of the apocalypse. As grief gets transformed into tenderness and fear gradually becomes absurd, the programme unlocks new ways of processing – and transcending – the system’s critical errors. ‘The Screens of Blue Nothingness’ is therefore an invitation to not only tame the ends but to also imagine what happens after.

Video programme, 44 min

  •  sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, 2015, dir. Tomonari Nishikawa
  • No Foe Can Scare Us, 1978, dir. Edmundas Zubavičius
  • May You Live in Interesting Times, 2022, dir. Martyna Ratnik
  • CASTOROCENE, 2021, dir. George Finlay Ramsay
  • to forget, 2019, dir. Lydia Nsiah

The films are being screened in the original language with Lithuanian subtitles.

Martyna Ratnik (b. 1999) is a Vilnius-based cultural worker. Her practice, spanning writing, filmmaking and curation, focuses on landscapes and their (de)colonization, the aesthetics of boredom and memory politics. Martyna’s work explores the tensions arising between grand narratives and the everyday and is interconnected by the search for various ways history – from personal to planetary – can be embodied and transgressed. Since 2022 she has been a member of the London Short Film Festival’s Selection Committee.


The curator would like to thank Ona Kotryna Dikavičiūtė, Gerda Paliušytė, Toma Buivydaitė, Rimantas Oičenka, Gabrielė Dzekunskaitė, Studio Cryo, Donata Šiaudvydytė, Donna Marcus Duke, Povilas Dikavičius, Algis Sprindžiūnas and George Finlay Ramsay.

Funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture