They spent ten years pitching English-language sci-fi projects. Then they went home to Lithuania and made one of the most fully realized dystopian worlds in recent cinema. It cost €5 million - less than most streaming productions - and looks like nothing that costs more.

Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper call VESPER (2022) a fairy tale with a sci-fi framework - it has the logic of myth rather than mechanics.

The film is set in "the new dark ages" - after humanity tried to fix ecological collapse by weaponizing biotechnology and the organisms escaped into the wild. Plants shoot toxins. Night is lethal. Food is rationed by oligarchs.

Vesper is 13, living in a forest house with her paralyzed father, Darius, who communicates through a floating drone head. When the drone breaks, we follow her journey through a world that looks like Bosch filtered through Giger.

Vesper was shot entirely on location in the forests around Vilnius with practical effects and only sparing CG enhancements, no green screens. Cinematographer Feliksas Abrukauskas drew inspiration from Vermeer and Rembrandt for the lighting - a classical approach to dystopia where dark greens and browns encroach on every frame.

Critics compared it to Tarkovsky and Annihilation, but Vesper is its own thing: a film about refusal to be a victim, about standing rooted despite everything.