By Atma Tattva Das,
Best Friend is a heartfelt devotional film weaving sankirtan history, personal reflection, and creative outreach, crafted with sincerity and faith through immense challenges. It is also the culmination of a journey that began when a Best Friend filmmaker, Gita Galadauskaite, was a young girl in Lithuania, falling asleep to cassette recordings of devotional classes. Among them was a sankirtan story, likely narrated by Indradyumna Swami, that left such an impression that she remembered it decades later.
Though she had forgotten most of the tiny details of the story she had heard growing up, this particular account remained vivid in her memory. When the pandemic brought isolation and uncertainty into her life as a film extra and now a first-time filmmaker based in Toronto, that childhood memory resurfaced and became the seed of her latest devotional project.
Gita had once staged the story as a theatre production in Lithuania, but every trace of that effort disappeared (photos, files, all of it). The sense of mystery lingered. When Toronto’s strict lockdowns left her navigating months and months of solitude, she searched for something creative, comforting, and grounding.
The idea of telling that sankirtan story again arrived naturally. “I needed an outlet during the isolation time…I needed something to help me, and to do something collectively.” What began as a search for stability slowly expanded into a four-year creative undertaking shaped by persistence and divine arrangement.
Read more: https://iskconnews.org/a-forgotten-sankirtan-story-becomes-a-powerful-short-film/
Comments