Episode Transcript: How to Divorce During the War

This is Jacob Krueger, coming to you from the very last Sundance in Park City. And as I do every year, I’m going to be teaching you the lessons that you can learn from the shows that I’ve seen here at Sundance.

As always, I will warn you before I spoil anything. So if you want to see the movies, you can — but we’re also going to be pulling little tidbits out that you can learn even if you have not yet seen the films.

One of my favorite films that I’ve seen here at Sundance is How to Divorce During the War. This is some extraordinary screenwriting and filmmaking.

Lesson 1: The Surprising First Image of How to Divorce During the War

For a piece called How to Divorce During the War — a script that actually tells you what it’s about right there in the title — the opening is pretty surprising.

We’re watching a middle-aged man open a box. The film sits on him for a surprisingly long time as he’s opening the box, building this feeling of mystery.

The next cut is a beautiful office chair, and we realize that must have been what was in the box. And the next cut is him sitting down in his beautiful new office chair to write. And so we’re telling ourselves this story of this man being a writer.

But in the next cut, he completely changes the story on us, because we see him replacing the new chair with his old chair. Instead of focusing on his script, he’s focusing on the right chair.

But then the next thing we see is a series of shots where we see him doing all the chores around his house, and now we’re telling ourselves a different story. We’re telling ourselves a story of a person who is desperate to write, but who is afraid — who is not willing to deal with the discomfort it would take, and instead is hiding in the mundanity of his daily life.

Lesson 2: Building Your Script Around Theme

One of the most powerful lessons you can take from How to Divorce During the War, whether you’ve seen it or not, is the extraordinarily elegant use of theme in this piece.

Andrius Blaževičius builds this script around the theme of comfort and discomfort. Every character in the script is on some kind of journey in relation to the comfortable lives that they don’t want to lose, and the discomfort it would take to actually live up to their values.

And this theme is threaded through the structure of the script. It’s threaded through every character’s journey. It’s threaded through the first and last image of the script. And this is a really beautiful way of focusing your writing. Sometimes you can say: what am I curious about? What am I curious about in myself?

Because this film does not take place in Ukraine. It takes place in the neighboring country of Lithuania. And this is very interesting, because it allows the Ukraine war to recede into the background and to be more reflective of our experience with the Ukraine war, where we are living such extraordinarily comfortable lives.

I actually bumped into Andrius Blaževičius, the writer-director, and we struck up a conversation. He and his cast are all from Lithuania. They’re all scared that they are next — but they are also far enough away for this to be happening in their backyard, not at their front door.

This may be about the Ukraine war, but it’s also about how we shy away from the discomfort of doing what really matters. And it’s the story of a blocked writer.

So against the backdrop of the Ukraine war, we get this beautiful little character-driven story that happens in relation to it. And the two things become metaphors for each other in the way that the script is built.

Lesson 3: Let the Cuts Tell the Story

And what’s beautiful: there’s not a single word of dialogue in which this script tells us “I’m blocked.” It’s all done with cuts.

There’s very little spoon-fed to you in How to Divorce During the War. Rather, what the writer-director does is he invites you to tell yourself the story. It allows the script to move faster. It allows a certain elegance to the script.

It gets a bunch of laughs — there are so many cuts in this pretty heartbreaking movie that get that little moment of laughter. And most importantly, it does not allow you to be a passive viewer.

Vytas and Marija: Two Characters Compromised in Opposite Ways

Now, what we’re about to learn about this character, Vytas — played really brilliantly by Marius Repsys — is that Vytas might be living the life of a house husband now, but ten years ago, Vytas was the hottest indie filmmaker out there.

Vytas had an extraordinary career. Vytas was making art that mattered. And now he has lost himself, and he is trying to write, but he keeps escaping into the things that bring him comfort rather than sitting in the discomfort of trying to write his next movie. Vytas is a man of ideals who is failing to live up to his ideals.

His wife Marija — played in an absolutely luminous performance by Zygimante Elena Jakstaite, who we also met on the bus — is the opposite of her husband. While her husband is slaving away, or failing to slave away, on the great script, she has sold out to corporate art. She’s making the dumbest possible content and making a ton of money doing it.

She has risen up to a place of great opportunity at her corporate production company making total crap. And unlike Vytas, Marija doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. She seems to like her life and her power, and she seems very dedicated to her work.

When one of their content pieces gets some direction from up high that’s going to make it even worse, she doesn’t fight it. She says that’s what they want, and they do it. And she gets rewarded by praise from her CEO, who seems to trust her like a right hand.

And what we’re going to come to learn is that while she may on some level feel like a sellout, Marija is supporting everybody. Marija is supporting her husband, who hasn’t made a penny in ten years. She’s supporting her daughter, and she’s supporting the lifestyle and the comfort that keeps them going.

The Divorce: Seeing the Darkness in Characters We Love

She has had enough. She has fallen out of love with her husband — and this is all the very beginning of the movie, so don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything for you. As they drop off their daughter for her violin practice, she drops the news to her husband that she wants a divorce.

Now this is a really beautiful scene, because we meet these two characters and we really like them both. We really connect to this blocked writer, and we really connect to this woman who is trying so hard to support her family. We like them, and we kind of want them to be together.

They start their conversation in a relatively kind, simple way. But it soon escalates. And by the time it’s done, we have seen the darkness in both of them.

She has screamed at her husband how much she hates him, how she feels strangled. He’s responded by almost strangling her physically — putting his hands on her neck, then getting out of the car, and then coming back and sitting down again.

So we go on this little journey in what, in another script, would be a kind of obligatory scene. Suddenly, in these characters that we kind of love, we start to see that there’s something very dark in both of them.

They’ve gotten to the end of the conversation and they’re having a divorce, and there’s no debate. He wants to go to therapy and she doesn’t. What she wants: she wants him to be the man he was ten years ago. She wants him to be the guy who hasn’t sold out, even as she’s the one who has.

She wants him to be the one who’s exciting, who’s taking them out drinking and dancing and partying. She wants that life that she signed up for. She didn’t sign up for a house husband.

And that’s the one thing that he can’t give her — not necessarily because he doesn’t want to, but because he’s grown accustomed to his highly supported, comfortable life. A life where he doesn’t have to do the hard thing, where he can go buy stuff on their version of Amazon rather than having to confront the fear of the blank page, where he can find purpose in his life by being a house husband.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a house husband. But this man — we could tell from the very first action of buying the right chair that’s supposed to free him from his block — this man wants to write a script.

So we have this really beautiful conflict and these really complicated characters, and they’ve come to a decision. And we think this is the inciting incident of the piece. We think this is what’s going to start the movie. But then it doesn’t. Because the little girl gets back in the car after her violin lesson, and nobody tells her what’s just happened.

And we start to wonder: is this divorce even really going to happen? Because they’re not ready to tell the daughter. At least Marija, the one who asked for the divorce, is not.

So what’s happened right in this opening sequence? We have built this incredible amount of pressure for these main characters, and we’ve locked in who they are, what they want, what their obstacles are, and what the theme of the piece is.

The theme, again, is not being spoken to the audience. Rather, it’s being subtly reflected in every single choice. You don’t need to get it at the beginning, but it’s going to create a feeling of unity through the piece that, by the end, is going to lead to a really extraordinary ending.

So we’ve already learned a few tools from this script. We’ve learned about first image. We’ve learned about theme. We’ve learned about using your cuts.

Lesson 4: Your Title Needs to Feel Like Your Movie

Number four, we need to learn about title. Your title needs to feel like your movie, and this title feels exactly like the movie.

In other words, “the war” feels like the war. But the “how to divorce” against that feels like — oh, this might be some kind of comedy against an incredibly bleak backdrop. That we are going to watch some kind of Kramer vs. Kramer story against the backdrop of the Ukraine war.

It not only tells us what it is — it contains the pitch — but more importantly, it contains the feeling of the piece. And that’s one of the reasons why this title is so successful. So all of that, just in the first ten minutes of this movie.

We’ve also started to learn about how this movie’s going to work: that when we start to think we know who the characters are, we’re going to add another layer. That in the cut, we’re going to get these surprises.

Lesson 5: The Real Inciting Incident

So here’s lesson five: the inciting incident. The title of this movie seems to promise you a very specific inciting incident. Oh, it’s going to be the divorce. And in fact, we get the divorce — but we don’t get the kid getting told. And that’s a surprise.

But the real inciting incident happens the next morning. Mom wakes up in bed alone. The daughter notices dad’s not in bed. And then she gets the news that the Ukraine war has just broken out.

And this is the actual inciting incident of the piece. This is something to think about: anything that is expected in your movie needs to play out in a slightly different way.

It’s called How to Divorce During the War. We know there’s going to be a war. But the choice to have the war start right after the divorce does a couple of amazing things.

Number one, it sets up this parallel — that in some way, the Ukraine war is a metaphor for the war that’s happening between mom and dad.

The second thing it does is it starts to show another level of complication in this character. Because even though she just asked for a divorce the night before, the moment the war breaks out, she goes running into the room where her husband is sleeping and shows him the news, looking for comfort from him.

So now, about ten minutes into this movie, we are locked in to two characters we love, and a little girl that we love — played brilliantly by Amelija Adomaityte. This little girl is going to be a full-blown character, a really interesting character, even though she has very few lines in the script. We’ve been introduced to a little girl who is highly perceptive, who notices that dad’s not there.

Think about all that’s happened in these first ten pages. We’ve been introduced to all three of our main characters: mom, dad, and their little girl. We’ve been introduced to the problem — that both of them are compromised in some way. Mom wants a divorce and dad doesn’t.

We’ve been introduced to the twist, which is that they’re not telling their daughter. And then we’ve been hit by surprise by the real inciting incident, which is the start of the war. And we’ve started a metaphorical system that’s going to weave through the entire script and relate to the theme.

This is some extraordinary first ten pages of screenwriting and filmmaking.

Lesson 6: Giving the Obligatory Scene a Twist

Lesson number six: obligatory scenes. This is a movie about a divorce that takes place during the Ukraine war in Lithuania. Everything has been set up. And the big problem is they haven’t told their daughter.

There’s got to be a moment where they tell their daughter, and we know how that moment’s going to play out, right? We’ve seen it in a million movies: “We still love you. Nothing’s going to change. You’re still going to see your daddy.” All that kind of stuff.

And we don’t want to turn that upside down. We don’t want to turn these into a nasty couple. This is a kind couple that loves their kid, and that’s part of the script. So how do you take this scene that feels like we’ve seen it before and turn it into something new?

This is one of the most important lessons that you can take: anything that your audience can anticipate is going to happen must not happen in exactly the way they’re expecting. You must give it some kind of twist. You must come at it from some kind of angle.

If the audience could already know it was happening just by the title, or just by the opening, or just by what’s already happened, showing it to them doesn’t do anything for them. It basically goes, “As you know… as you know… as you know.” We don’t want to do those “as you know” scenes. We want to give those scenes a twist.

So here’s the way that this beautiful movie does that. Instead of the parents telling the daughter, dad makes a decision. He starts packing his bags and he’s going to leave. Again, we’re seeing this complicated, dark side of him. He’s not even going to tell his daughter. That’s his plan.

And Marija says, “Vytas, what are you doing? Think about how she’s going to feel.”

Then, in a cut, we see the two of them there with the daughter. Now they’re going to tell her, right? So already we’ve come at it from a slightly different angle. But then it gets even better. Because instead of the parents reporting to the daughter that they’re getting divorced, the daughter reports it to the parents.

She basically says, “So you’re going to tell me that everything’s going to be the same and that you still love me?” We get the daughter saying those words that we know are coming — to the parents. And Marija’s like, “How did you know this?” And Dovile, this wonderful little girl, is like, “Because my friend’s parents got divorced and we talked.”

So we get this wonderful little twist. And look how much that twist does. Number one, we’re getting to see how ill-prepared the parents are to handle and help with the emotions of the kid.

We’re learning the degree to which the parents are not even realizing how much their little girl is seeing, feeling and experiencing. In their imagination, she’s just a little girl and they’re the adults. But the truth is, she is actually much more aware and perceptive of the situation — and in some ways more prepared for it than they are.

So that’s lesson number six: anything that we have seen before, exactly this way, you’ve got to come at a different way.

Spoiler warning: At this point, I am going to start spoiling the events of this movie, because in order to illustrate how these concepts work, I have to talk to you about how this wonderful piece has been built. So if you have not yet seen the movie and you don’t want it spoiled, now is a good time to stop — you’ve got six great lessons. Take those six great lessons, because from here on, I’m going to share the plot beyond the first ten minutes.

Lesson 7: Your Character’s Journey in Relation to the Theme

Lesson number seven from How to Divorce During the War is about your character’s journey in relation to the theme.

Your job as a writer is to apply enough discomfort to your character, or enough of a wish for your character, in order to get them to go on a journey of change. Because all of our characters are like Vytas and Marija: all of our characters don’t want to change.

All of our characters want to stay in a comfortable place, and all of our characters have dreams of a better life. All of our characters, just like all of us, crave comfort. And therefore, as a writer, you’ve got to push them to a place where they can change — where there is no choice but to endure the discomfort.

And that’s what’s really incredible. That’s what the divorce and this war do for these characters. This one-two punch forces both of these characters to a place where they’re going to start to pursue what really matters to them.

One of the fun things that happens in the breakup scene, where Marija demands the divorce from Vytas, is that he asks her multiple times: “There’s got to be somebody else. There’s got to be somebody else.”

And being a great writer-director, Andrius Blaževičius does it in a cut. We get a cut from a wonderfully awkward scene where Marija tries to give comfort to her team members at work about the war — and we start to see that she’s not really great at that. In fact, her second-in-command has to kind of take over and tell everybody to go back to work.

And then we get this wonderful cut where we see the two of them in bed together. And we realize there is somebody else — and that somebody else is a woman. And all this is being kept secret from Vytas.

And so it’s really interesting, because what we’re starting to realize is that it’s not just that Marija is sick of Vytas. It’s that she has a bigger dream, and that’s what’s made her finally choose the discomfort of leaving Vytas.

This is what you need to think about for your characters: how are you using both discomfort and a bigger dream to push them to a place where they’re trying to change?

She’s trying to live a more authentic life, a happier life, with the kind of person she really feels like she deserves and should be with. She doesn’t want a house husband. She didn’t marry a house husband. She wants a powerful right hand, and it looks like maybe she’s got one.

Similarly, Vytas is starting to change, despite the fact that he has zero dollars, and that his wife doesn’t even want to tell their kid. He is demanding that they make the divorce public and final, that they do it now. And even though he’s got no money and he’s a hundred percent dependent on Marija, he packs his bags and he’s going to move in with his parents.

So he’s also been pushed to this precipice of change. And his parents, of course, are the worst place for him to go. Because they, like a small subset of the people of Lithuania, are old school. They remember the time when Lithuania was part of Russia. They’re still watching the Russian shows they grew up on — and that means they’re also watching the Russian news. The propaganda.

Just like in our country, where we live in two different realities — the people who watch Fox News and the people who get their news from other media sources — the same thing is happening in Lithuania.

So Vytas, who’s just been rocked by two different wars — the war with his wife and the war in Ukraine — gets sent home to live with two people who, though they don’t want to say it, are kind of with the Russians. They kind of think maybe this is kind of Ukraine’s fault. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the Russians came back, even if Lithuania were to fall next. Maybe they’re okay with that.

So we have this parallel to what’s happening in our country, happening in their country: this true horror is playing out in the background, but it’s just far enough away that we can have the opinions about it that fit our values and make us feel more comfortable.

This is where Vytas has been sent back to. And in response to that, Vytas starts to remake his life. He starts to actually live a more authentic life. Even though he’s not really writing, he starts to volunteer — even though he has no money himself — at a food bank that is distributing food to the Ukrainian refugees who are spilling into nearby Lithuania to escape the terrible things happening in their country.

So you have a guy who, once again, for the first time, starts to live an authentic life. He starts to be something more than just a house husband, starts to live more of his real dream, and starts to be more of the role model for his little girl that he wants to be. Not a person who’s running away from his dreams, but a person who’s running towards them — and being a better father in the process.

But every night he’s got to go home and deal with his parents, whose opinions are anathema to everything he believes. So we have these characters in this wonderful position that’s forcing them to change — forcing them to make choices between the comfort of getting along with your parents, the comfort of the life you used to have, and doing the right thing: chasing the right dream, trying to do the thing that matters to them.

He’s going to start to do some performance art to bring awareness to the war, and that’s going to bring his name back into the press. And people are going to start to treat him like an artist again — like somebody who matters.

So we’ve got this character who’s going on this journey. And in a traditional movie, we think, okay, this character is going to change, because he’s under so much pressure to do so.

Similarly, Marija is under so much pressure to change. Marija, who’s been relatively comfortable selling out in the corporate world, who’s not chasing the dream of being a great artist but rather chasing the dream of living a great life — all she wants by her side is a total badass partner, maybe through whom she can kind of live the authentic creative life that she’s not willing to give herself.

She also is put under tremendous pressure, because her company has a Russian branch, and there’s a lot of pressure on them to close down the Russian branch, as a lot of other corporations are doing, so they can stop paying the taxes that support the war.

And of course, here, metaphorically, we can see our own complicity too. Because every single one of us has supported some corporation, some business — has bought a product, has worked for a company, has done something to support, not directly but indirectly, things that we find anathema to our actual belief systems and who we want to be. All of us have chosen the comfort of complicity.

Every single one of us, myself included, is in a constant war between the comfort of the life that we don’t want to lose, and what it would actually take to pull out of the society that we’re in — the society that we know doesn’t actually fit our values.

So we have this really complicated recipe here, and it comes to a decision point for her. Her new girlfriend tells her, “Look, everybody’s on your side, Marija. Everybody thinks that we need to leave Russia. And if you quit, they’ll probably quit too.”

And so Marija goes into the CEO’s office and tells her, “If you don’t leave Russia, I’m going to quit.”

You can see that both of these characters are under this extreme pressure that’s going to force big choices — where they’re going to have to start to chase the authentic person that they want to be, the actual values that they hold, against extraordinary obstacles.

Lesson 8: Punish Your Characters for Their Right Choices

When Marija threatens to quit, her boss lets her. And nobody follows along. And this is the beginning of the discomfort. In fact, her girlfriend gets an opportunity to take Marija’s job — and she wants to take it.

And now Marija makes another huge choice under pressure: she breaks up with her girlfriend. And we’re seeing that Marija is actually, for the first time in her life, not compromising. She is not selling out — not even to get what she wants. Not even to get the dream partner she’s been searching for.

In fact, she’s going to take one more step that we never would have imagined for her: she’s going to bring in a family of Ukrainian refugees. We never imagined she would do this — a woman who values her beautiful home and her privacy, things being just so, things being clean.

And why does she take them in? She takes them in because of her daughter — her daughter, who says some of the other parents are bringing in refugees. And she wants to be that role model to her daughter. She wants to be the person her daughter thinks she is.

So we’re watching this character go on a huge journey of change. And every choice they make gets punished. And this is lesson number eight: whatever right choice your character makes, they must be horrifically punished for it.

If making the choices that we truly need to make was easy, we would all make them all the time. If living an authentic life in keeping with our values was easy, we would all do it.

All of us have fears of what might happen if we actually lived our authentic life, if we actually stepped into the discomfort — out of the world we’ve known, into the world we want to inhabit. So you want to make sure that not only do your character’s fears happen, but hopefully even worse than your character’s fears happens. Because you want to test your characters and see if they can survive the worst of their fears and actually come out through the other side.

A change that takes place without the worst thing happening is not really a change. It’s some good luck. It’s a step. A change that takes place in the face of the greatest obstacles you can create — that’s real change. And that’s not true just in a script. That’s true in your life.

So lesson number eight: you want to torture your characters to the greatest degree you can. You want to punish them for their right decisions and see if they can stick to them.

So we have this really amazing journey that’s been built. We have these two different characters, and now we’re going to talk about how they both get punished for doing the right thing.

Mom has left her job, left her girlfriend, dealt with the fact that she’s got no money, no purpose, nothing to do. She has taken in a bunch of Ukrainian refugees. She is finally living the kind of life that she believes in, living up to her values.

But these refugees come with unexpected consequences. They are messy. They are making the place a mess. The kids aren’t going to school. They’re not treating her with respect. She asks them in English why they’re not in school, and in English, they go, “We don’t understand.”

These kids are not behaving like the perfect refugee family that she intended, and she doesn’t like it. Ironically, if her husband had been there — he’s been the house husband, he’s been the person cooking, cleaning, making sure that everything is just so, the way she wants it and needs it — maybe she could have handled it. But without him, she cannot.

It’s not that these people have anywhere else to go. It’s not that she doesn’t want to take care of them. But it’s uncomfortable, and she can’t deal with the discomfort. And she makes the choice to send them away.

So we’re watching this complicated woman truly trying to do the right thing, but breaking under the pressure of the right thing not having the instantaneous payoff, not feeling good the way it’s supposed to — of the people she’s inviting in not being “perfect people,” but rather complicated humans who are occupying her house.

In fact, in a lot of ways, we’re watching Marija do exactly what her husband did at the beginning. We’re watching this character who started at a place of total sellout trying to do something important, and then giving up in the face of the discomfort of it — just like her husband gives up on his screenplay to seek shelter in the comfortable.

Meanwhile, we’re watching Vytas go on this incredible journey where he’s really changing. He might not have any money, and he might not even be doing his art, but he’s doing something that matters to the world, something that fits his values. He’s living this authentic life. And Vytas does the thing that he’s probably needed to do since he was a kid.

See, his mom and dad have this satellite where they’re getting all this bullshit Russian propaganda, and he simply cannot take it anymore. Now, again, this is another obligatory scene. You’re expecting to see the confrontation between them. But this brilliant director does it in a cut instead.

We just see an image of him knocking down the satellite, and we’re like, “Yes! He has finally stood up to his parents!” This man is growing. He’s going on a huge journey. He’s changing in relation to the theme. He’s allowing himself some discomfort.

But then, bang, in a cut, Andrius Blaževičius tells us the consequences of that — the worst possible consequences. We see him bathing in a river, washing himself in a river, sleeping in his car. We start to realize: oh, they kicked him out.

We don’t get the obligatory scene where they tell him they’re kicking him out. Instead, we get the cut where we go, oh — the consequences were so much worse than he imagined.

Lesson 9: The Answers Are in What You’ve Already Written

Which brings us to lesson nine: all the answers for where you need to go in your script are at the beginning. All the answers for what needs to come in your script are in what you have already written.

Earlier, we talked about the opening of the movie, where, in his procrastination attempts, Vytas has cleaned the house and bought a hat for his wife.

In a really brilliant scene — after she’s lost her job, after she’s lost her partner, after her life has started to fall apart — that hat arrives. That hat arrives, and Marija puts on the hat, and it makes her happy. It brings her comfort.

In fact, she takes a picture of herself, which she sends to her husband. And it’s the first moment we’ve seen her starting to reach out to him. We start to realize that for all of her pushing away, her hatred and her anger at him, there’s also a part of her that feels comforted and loves him.

And you can see this is a mirror to that moment at the beginning when the war breaks out, and just after telling him she wants a divorce, she goes running to him for comfort. This is an even bigger version: she’s reaching out to her husband. This procrastination technique, this wrong thing, ends up paying off by being the right thing that starts to move his wife — who he is still madly in love with — back towards him.

Similarly, we have a running gag with Vytas. Vytas is so angry at the Russians for everything that’s happening — and, of course, for all the problems he’s having with his parents that he can’t fully express to them — that every time he sees a car with a Russian license plate, he throws a rock through it.

We’ve seen him do it once without consequence. But now we see him do it again, and a bunch of Russians catch him and beat the crap out of him. And this brings him back to his wife, who cares for him, who tends to him, who nurses his wounds.

So what we have here is the movement back towards where we started. And in a lot of movies, this would be a happy ending. In a lot of movies, these characters would go through a change that brings them back together.

Because you can see these characters are at the cusp — the cusp of the kind of change we wish for them, where he might become a real artist and be the man that she wants and desires, the man that he wants to be. Where she might become the woman that she wants to be.

And all of this is mined from just two images: a running gag of him throwing a rock, and a little joke about ordering a hat because you don’t want to write your script. The answers you need for where you need to go are back where you started. They’re in what you’ve already written.

Lesson 10: The Last Image of How to Divorce During the War

Which brings us to lesson number ten: the last image. The last image of your script is ultimately going to tell us what the script means and what it says.

As we’ve talked about, what’s so beautiful about this script is that it moves these characters that we truly love — these complicated, imperfect characters, making good choices and making bad choices, moving towards their dreams and moving away from their dreams — and it pushes them to a point where they are this close to being who they really want to be. Where they might actually heal.

Dad shows up, and he’s all beaten up, and she takes care of him. And then we cut to a scene that is basically a reflection of the scene way back at the beginning, when Marija told her husband she wanted a divorce, and then her little girl got back in the car and nobody said anything.

Dad shows up. He needs to be taken care of. Mom takes care of him. And then we cut, and the little girl comes into the house, and there’s mom and dad. Dad’s being house husband, chopping the vegetables. Mom’s doing her work. And nobody’s talking about it.

It’s like nothing happened. But it’s not a beautiful, happy reunion. It’s this silent, distant reunion where people aren’t really sharing, aren’t really talking to each other. And we start to realize, in that one cut, in that one action — the beginning of the final sequence of the piece — that mom and dad are not changing.

Dad’s not at his computer writing. Mom’s not quitting her job to do something that matters. Mom’s not bringing the refugees back. Mom and dad are silently, unhappily going back to their comfortable routine.

And the little girl sees it. And with her, we see it and understand it.

One of the beautiful things about the way this piece is built is that the daughter has barely any words, but we’re watching her hair grow longer and longer and longer over the course of the journey. And it’s just this little image that tells us no one is caring for her.

No one is seeing her. Her dad obviously used to take care of this, and it’s just not happening. Nobody is watching out for her. Nobody is seeing the consequences for her.

And she’s perceiving all of this, and we’re seeing it through her eyes. And this is the beginning of the final sequence, because what’s actually going to happen at the end of this movie is not change.

Mom — who has already kicked out the refugees, gone back to her job, in fact gotten her lover fired — is going to go back to her routine of being the provider. Dad — who’s come so close, who’s confronted his parents, who’s volunteered, who’s thrown a rock through a Russian car — is going to go back to being a house husband.

And in that one little moment, with no words, with no backstory, with no drama, with no exposition, we get all of it through the eyes of a little girl who barely has a line.

We’re then going to tell the story in another cut. We see the little girl listening at mom and dad’s bedroom. And in that listening, she hears they are not having sex. They are not healed. This is not a happy ending.

This is not a story about characters moving through discomfort to discover who they really are. This is a movie about characters getting this close to moving through discomfort, only to choose comfort instead. This is about characters coming to the precipice where they might have actually found each other again, or found real happiness themselves — and instead going back to the routine.

We then have another cut, to the daughter all alone, crying. And without a single word, we understand what she understands: that the comfort her parents are finding right now together is the saddest possible ending for this movie.

And then we get another cut that makes it even more devastating. We cut to the daughter, still crying, lying in bed between her unhappy mom and dad. And we realize that she is repeating the cycle — the cycle her parents started by not being able to deal with their discomfort. We have now seen her seeing the truth of what her parents are, and nevertheless choosing the comfort of that problematic relationship over a journey into discomfort.

So we get this devastating image. And in a different story, with a slightly different sequence, this is a happy ending! In a slightly different story, this is about a dad who finds his political conscience, a mom who finds her political conscience, a dad who finds his way back to art in an unexpected way, a mom who finds her real purpose in an unexpected way — and a family that comes together, all asleep together, with a loving, happy relationship and a loving, happy role model for their beautiful, incredible, talented, gifted daughter.

But in this sequence of images, we get the exact opposite. This image that should be comforting for us, the audience, is absolutely devastating.

And we hold on that image, and we think that we’re going to end there. But Andrius Blaževičius has one last trick up his sleeve: that final image, the most important image of the whole script. Because we cut outside of the house to see the whole city.

And in that cut, without a single word, what Andrius Blaževičius tells us is that this is not just happening for Marija and Vytas and Dovile. This is happening for all of us — for everyone in this town in Lithuania, for everyone in Lithuania, for everyone in Europe, for everyone in America, for everyone in the world. All of us are in this struggle between the complicity that keeps us comfortable, and the hard choices in pursuit of what we really value that would allow us to become the people that we want to be.

So I hope that you have enjoyed these ten lessons from this beautiful film, How to Divorce During the War, from the Sundance Film Festival 2026. The moment you get to see this movie: run, don’t walk.