Mantas Kvedaravičius

Biržai, Lithuania

Mantas Kvedaravičius (23 June 1976 – 30 March 2022; Biržai, Lithuanian SSR) was a Lithuanian filmmaker, documentary director, anthropologist and archaeologist known for war reporting in hostile areas. Mantas Kvedaravičius was killed on 30 March 2022 during the Siege of Mariupol (Russo-Ukrainian War).

Kvedaravičius held a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and was an associate professor at Vilnius University. His doctoral thesis concerns "Knots of absence: death, dreams, and disappearances at the limits of law in the counter-terrorism zone of Chechnya" (Cambridge University, 2012). War-torn Chechnya, one of the republics of the Russian Federation, is also the setting of his 2011 documentary film, Barzakh ("Limbo"). His next documentary film, published in 2016, focuses on the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which in the years 2014–15 had come under the attacks of separatist troops. In 2019, Kvedaravičius's first feature film appeared, Partenonas (Parthenon), set in Athens, Odessa, and Istanbul. Based on several years of ethnographic research, it is a movie about the enigmatic workings of memory. In arresting, often disconnected images, the pivotal character revives various lives he may have lived. "Memories betray him, but he knows for sure that in one of these lives, he will be killed."

Working on yet another Mariupol documentary, Mantas Kvedaravičius was killed on 30 March 2022 during the Siege of Mariupol. Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine's ombudsperson for human rights, alleged that Kvedaravičius "was taken prisoner by 'rashists', who later shot him. The occupiers threw the director's body out into the street". Kvedaravičius's friend, Hanna Bilobrova, reported that two days after his death, a Russian soldier had led her to his body. She said that he had been shot in the stomach, but there was "no blood on the ground" and no bullet hole in the clothes he was wearing. Bilobrova, who brought his body home to Lithuania, has completed his Mariupolis 2 film.