Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Lithuania but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.

Country: Lithuania
Movie:  Nova Lituania [New Lithuania]
Director: Karolis Kaupinis
Year: 2019
The Elevator Pitch: During the interwar period in Lithuania has the country is encroached upon by its larger and more aggressive neighbors from all sides a professor tries to pitch his novel ideal to preserve the country.

How Was the Movie?: 

This movie was a little bit more a gut punch than I thought it was going to be. It’s a surprisingly subdued film for being about a deeply strange political pitch. The movie is based on an actual person and proposal but the movie does move around some of the timeline and people in order to tell its own cohesive story. The best parts of the movie were the parallels that were drawn between Gruodis’ personal life and the political struggle of Lithuania but at times I felt like the movie was a couple seconds from really telling us how they feel. Too much restraint. 

The camera work is kind of a mess even though I understand what they were trying to do. I think this was an extremely well-acted film though, especially the lead character Feliksas [Aleksas Kazanavičius] and the Prime Minister [Vaidotas Martinaitis] had such great chemistry as screen partners. I felt like it was kind of unfortunate that a lot of these movie is so deeply understated that I think it will kind of glide by most people who watch it but knowing what happens only a handful of months after the end of the film made everything inside of it 10x more brutal. Obviously the people involved were all pretty aware of what was going to happen also but I was trying to watch a movie and not feel like I was being swallowed by history. Pretty good. 

We wanted to watch Paradas but it turns out that you need to have a Telia in Lithuania and not just one in Estonia but I still really want to watch it 🙁

What was for Dinner?:

I actually had a very difficult time trying to find Lithuanian recipes that I wanted to make/could make because I do not eat pork and pretty much every recipe had pork. I was going to make a potato recipe but potatoes seemed too heavy for the summer heat so I settled on a possibly boring staple of the Lithuanian variants of dumplings, koldūnai, because they’re easy and customizable. Specially I made koldūnai with chicken, mushrooms, and shallots. Obviously served with the extra filling on top, some sour cream, and herbs. It’s hard to go wrong with dumplings and these ones were super delicious and not too time consuming to make. The dough doesn’t have to sit and they seem to be (from a general survey) simply cut in circles and folded, I sealed them with a little water and not a single one burst in the pot! These were so good and really filling also I was pretty impressed.

For dessert I made Pyragas „Draugystė“ which is Friendship Cake. This is a kind of unusual cake and I forgot to put the egg yolk on top but it still turned out really delicious. Mine is very ugly because I halved the recipe but didn’t have a small enough pan so I had to do a lot of weird things to it but the finished product was great. It’s basically a cookie bar cake with jam and farmers cheese between two layers of a thick cookie-like layer. I used blueberry jam and it was sooo good. It’s the right combination of really sweet thick cookie with salty cheese and tart jam. Also it probably took all of 15 minutes to make and I whipped the egg white by hand so that was most of the time I spent making it.

We had some sparkling plum wine from Lithuania also which I’m not sure how traditional that is but it was extremely available at the supermarket. All together it was a really great dinner.

That’s it for Lithuania, see you next in Turkey!