Title: Concrete Kids
Foreign Title: Betono vaikai
Year: 2026
Country of Origin: Lithuania
Language: In Lithuanian with English subtitles
Director: Saulius Baradinskas
Click here to see the cast and crew
Ah, feature or short, it’s the dilemma of fiction.
What if?
The myriad moves available to a young director often determines the outcome.
Is it going too far to suggest that leaning on one’s own traumatic memories of street violence should always give the green light to this young Lithuanian filmmaker who believes that art – in this case, music and dance – can be the catalyst for change?
Because Saulius Baradinskas is a director with music and dance in his portfolio DNA, an award winner year after year since 2015, it’s no wonder that he cast the protagonist of his new film Concrete Kids as the lead voice in the high school choir but Rokas has been failing in his grades, an altogether familiar story of the right kid in with the wrong crowd, the Reds, a local gang whose red outfits shout Russian to those in the know.
Failing grades and money owed to the local gang is almost typical for the Baradinskas archetype, a lonely teenager whose dream is of America, promised him by his mother and broken with her absence on the night of his performance, an empty chair in the front row. She leaves him with a new jacket, sure to become a prize for his rivals.
I can’t help but see the gang violence we witness in this film is a stand-in for the post-soviet claustrophobia lived by youths growing up in Vilnius’ apartment district; Rokas seems to be trapped walking, running, chased through one principal setting, a playground surrounded by the towering tenements. It is here, on the checkered territory of the Reds – a gang whose martial arts moves are wonderfully shot from above – that a sudden choreographed dance flips this teenage coming of age trope into the wheelhouse of a Lithuanian West Side Story played to the theme of Ravel’s Bolero, a solo snare drum repeating Rokas’ hard-won struggle, expressed in a crescendo, a song of yearning with the choir. His victory is short-lived; the juvenile who saves him issues a warning as if called down from a future musical: “You can’t escape the neighbourhood.”
