Before Flying Back to Earth

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Arunas Matelis' film is a gracefully expressive documentary following the lives of children living with leukemia at a pediatric hospital in Vilnius, Lithuania. The children enter into an alien world, bereft of color and warmth, but populated with kind strangers. Inured to the routine of daily medication and meals that alternate between porridge and cabbage soup, the children dream of life beyond the clinic's thick cement walls while their parents bear the burden of uncertainty about their children's fate. The filmmaker spent eight months at this very hospital after his own daughter's successful fight against leukemia.