Miglè Križinauskaitė
directors of Does the sea have a heart?

Program 4 | Creation Plays Itself | Saturday, April 25 | 7pm

Miglė Križinauskaitė is an audiovisual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. She holds an MA in Film Directing from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (2020) and is currently a PhD candidate specializing in experimental filmmaking. Does the sea have a heart? marries poetry and film, capturing the memory and essence of vast bodies of water through their tender tides and peripheral matter. 

​

Kathryn Odum, WOEFF: To begin, I wanted to ask a general question about what draws you to the ocean? Your bio mentioned exploring the relationship between artist and nature, so I was curious about what specifically inspired the composition of this film? 

​

Miglė Križinauskaitė: I’m drawn to the ocean as a space where perception begins to dissolve. I think it resists being fully seen or fully understood. It is always shifting, always withholding something. In my artistic practice, I’m interested in the relationship between the body and landscape, and, in a way, the ocean, the sea, this vast expanse of water, feels like a threshold where those boundaries begin to blur. 

At the same time, my connection to the sea is very personal, I would say. I did not grow up next to the sea. I grew up about 300 kilometers away from the coast, in a small town called Utena in Lithuania, so it was never part of my everyday environment. But each summer, my family would travel to the Baltic seaside for about a week when I was a child. Those memories have stayed with me very vividly. There was nothing particularly extraordinary, just hot sun, hot sand, small playful games on the beach, strong wind, sand on wet skin, and long night walks from the camping site to the water. I remember the sound of the waves at night and that quiet sense of being together, not always visible but deeply felt. It was, I think, a kind of contained time, slightly outside of daily life. 

I think the film emerged somewhere between these two experiences. The sea as something distant and imagined, and at the same time deeply embedded in memory. Does the sea have a heart? came from this desire to approach the sea not only as a moving image, but as a presence shaped by both physical distance and emotional closeness. 

So I think this distance also shaped the way I composed the film. It is built through fragments, pauses, and shifting perspectives, rather than a fixed or complete image. I wanted it to feel, in a way, like memory itself, something partial, something that you approach but never fully reach. 

​

KO: I love the music of your film and how it makes the sea into an ethereal, euphonious experience. How did you go about creating the ambiance and music of the sea? 

​

MK: Sound was a very important part of the film from the beginning. I wanted the sea to be felt not only visually, but also through atmosphere, something that surrounds the viewer and moves through the body. 

A big part of this comes from the work of the composer Karolina Kapustaitė. I used one of her existing compositions, which is very sensitive and touching, and also incorporates field recordings. It became an integral part of the film’s sound, almost like another layer of the sea itself. 

Alongside this, I worked with my own field recording archive and fragments of ambient sound. I was interested in how different textures of sound could come together to create a sense of depth and immersion, not in a descriptive way, but in a more intuitive and emotional way. 

This kind of process is actually quite typical in my practice. I often work with sound and image together during editing, allowing them to influence each other. Sometimes the music leads the editing, shaping the rhythm and pacing of the images, and other times the image guides the sound. Working with analog film also shapes how I approach sound. The materiality of Super 8mm invites a slower, more tactile rhythm, letting the images and sound dialogue emerge naturally and intuitively. 

I also remember that in the first drafts I showed to colleagues, we all felt that the music was taking too much attention. It was too present, almost overpowering the images. So I had to carefully adjust that balance to make space for both. In the end, I think I managed to find a more subtle relationship, where the sound supports the film without dominating it and helps create a kind of internal pulse, something closer to a feeling than a fixed structure. 

​

KO: In your description, you call your film a “poetic essay,” and I noticed the text onscreen is employed through different ways: emphasizing gaps, silence, and trails of thoughts. Could you comment on how text plays a role with your images? 

​

MK: For me, the text moves in two ways. Sometimes it is like a voice inside the images, creating pauses, hesitations, and gaps. Moments to linger or to wonder. Other times it is literal and provocative, as in “waves come in pairs,” placed directly alongside the exact moving image. I think in both cases, the text collides with vision, echoing memory and thought rather than simply explaining them. In a way, it follows in the tradition of essay films by filmmakers like Chris Marker, where language and image exist in dialogue rather than hierarchy. 

​

KO: Many of the images contain the sea itself. However, there are some images that are far away from a body of water, such as the woman with her collection of shells and the images of water through a microscope. Does appreciation of the sea require proximity? How do we understand the sea and its heart when expressed through differing proximities and closeness? 

​

MK: I’m pretty sure that appreciation of the sea does not require physical proximity. For example, the woman in the film lives far from the coast, in a small village, yet her connection to the sea is profound. She even opened her own sea museum there years ago. When I filmed her, I asked when she had last been by the sea. She said many, many years ago, yet she seemed profoundly invested in it still, as if the memory carried the waves with her. For her, the sea exists through memory, imagination, and care, not just presence.  

I think the film shows that the heart of the sea can be felt through attention, through objects such as seashells brought by different people into the museum collection or water samples from the sea examined under a microscope at the Marine Research Institute in Klaipėda, through traces and reflections, whether we are standing at the water’s edge or many kilometers away. As Agnès Varda said in her autobiographical film “The Beaches of Agnès”:“If we opened people up, we would find landscapes. If we opened me up, we would find beaches.”I think that is true of the sea itself. Proximity is not only physical; it is emotional, attentive, and imaginative. 

​

KO: After watching the film multiple times, I always concluded that the heart of the sea was its soul, spirit, and essence. What emotions would you prescribe the sea within the context of the heart? 

​

MK: If I were to prescribe emotions to the sea, I would say it carries both intimacy and vastness. It holds memory, longing, and quiet reflection, but also freedom and release. In the film, I tried to show the sea as a space where absence becomes presence, where the human spirit is reflected through traces, echoes, and light on the water. As Kahlil Gibran wrote, “There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.” For me, the sea holds sadness, wonder, tenderness, and a quiet threat all at once. It is both intimate and infinite, and its heart beats with the complexity of our own emotions. 

​

KO: Additionally, there are many parts of the sea (other body parts, following your metaphor) that are not necessarily the water itself, but elements surrounding it: like the algae, sand, and shells. So, what can we learn about memories and emotions by looking only at the elements in its periphery? What do we pull out of these visuals?  

​

MK: I think the elements surrounding the sea, such as algae, sand, and shells, carry traces of memory and emotion. They are small signs that reveal presence through absence. After screenings, people often say that even by the ocean they rarely notice grains of sand or reflections of light with such care. For me, that attention is essential. By looking closely at these peripheral elements, we can sense stories, emotions, and histories. By the way, I like to imagine, poetically, how the film might look if it were not about the heart of the sea, but its feet or elbows—it would probably be a very clumsy or wobbly film, full of unexpected gestures and awkward angles, yet still strangely alive. 

​

This interview was conducted via email.

Avenir Light is a clean and stylish font favored by designers. It's easy on the eyes and a great go-to font for titles, paragraphs & more.