The final act leaves the city entirely. To find the "Baltic sun" at its purest, Kairys takes a hydrofoil to Kronstadt and then to the abandoned forts of the Gulf. The sun, now unobstructed by smog, burns the lens. The image bleaches to white. Then, just before the credits, a single second of color returns: a Soviet-era mosaic of the sun, peeling from a wall. Fin.
: Filmed on the shores of the Baltic Sea and along the Neva River, the documentary uses the natural landscape of St. Petersburg as a backdrop for discussions on bodily autonomy and cultural acceptance.
The film is structured as a chronological journey, blending vérité footage, interviews, and lyrical imagery.
A convoy transports the sun across the Latvian-Russian border. Saulītis captures the bureaucratic delays, the changing landscapes, and the growing anticipation. The journey becomes a metaphor for crossing historical and emotional divides.
Modern documentaries about St. Petersburg are sanitized. They show the renovated facades and the police on Segways. Kairys showed you the peeling paint, the leaking pipes, and the miracle of the sun that forgives it all.
One reviewer wrote: "Watching the restored 'Baltic Sun' is like looking at a family photo album the day before a war. The light is impossibly beautiful, because you know it will fade."
We think of documentaries as records of facts. This one is a record of a feeling . The feeling of a northern city, drunk on light, holding its breath between the USSR and whatever came next.
The year 2003 marked the tercentenary of St. Petersburg, a city founded by Tsar Peter the Great. For the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), St. Petersburg holds complex historical significance — as the imperial capital of the Russian Empire, which ruled the Baltics for over two centuries, and as a cultural beacon that influenced Baltic art, literature, and education.
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