It is very difficult to keep the line between past and present. Sometimes the past does not vanish - it remains latent, haunting the margins of the present a memory that refuses to fade. In the summer of 1990, as the Soviet empire unraveled and Lithuania reclaimed its sovereignty, a group of young artists set out on a one-day journey into the unknown: the Kaliningrad region, Russia, once East Prussia. The footage from that journey vanished during the Soviet military assault on Lithuanian media centers in January 1991. Three decades later, the forgotten tapes resurfaced, aged but intact. Alongside them emerged the photographs of Raimundas Urbonas, one of the travelers, whose images captured a fragile world on the brink of disappearance. My friend, Raimundas died under mysterious circumstances in Klaipeda, Lithuania in 1997. Officially, he drowned in a river near the sea. Unofficially, questions remain. His sudden death left only images behind, echoing the loss of the world he sought to preserve. Today, as Europe once again faces war and Russia reverberates with renewed militarization, those archival materials gain chilling relevance. Er/ased Worlds is an excavation of personal memory and flickers back into view.

Aušra Lukošiūnienė (born in Klaipėda in 1964) is a director, producer, and screenwriter who lives between Lithuania and France. After studying film directing in Saint Petersburg, she began her career at LRT, later creating documentary and experimental films exploring themes of memory, identity, and culture. Her latest works include the documentary film Juoda (Black, 2024) about architect Valdas Ozarinskas, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival (Cinéma de demain, Short Film Corner), screened at Paris Berlin International and VDFF, and nominated for the Silver Crane Award. Pra/rasti pasauliai (2025) is a short documentary film in post-production; Odysėja MD (co-production with Moldova, dir. P. Braila) is in post-production. Her projects include the installation Disonansai (2024, Vilnius, Paris, New York), the multimedia project Būtasis kartinis laikas (2025, Rome, Unarchive.it festival), and the installation Čia ir dabar (Arka Gallery, 2019/2024). She is the founder of the production company Vėgėlės filmai.