Algis Arlauskas retrospective  

“Madmen’s Conspiracy” is a story about Zaragoza citizen Enrique Gaston, a loveable eccentric university professor, today’s Don Quixote, who comes up constantly with beautiful and noble, but hardly achievable ideas. On the hills of a remote village of Jaulin, for example, Gaston wants to build an open-air theatre and dedicates fifty years of his life to fulfill the plan. He believes that a tree can grow on a plane cliff if you only visit and water it every day. The most important thing is to be hard-working every day in achieving one’s goals and not pay attention to those who think your efforts are fruitless. Only at the end of the film viewers learn that Gaston is listed as one of Spain’s top three mad people. However, Gaston’s life story asks the audience who is actually a bigger madman – modern society with all its crises and wars, or people who cannot find their place in a society like that?

Algis Arlauskas Pinedo was born in 1957, in Moscow. After graduating from the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute Arlauskas started working in Moscow Young Generation Theatre. His acting career in cinema started when he was fifteen-years-old. Arlauskas was one of the leading actors in a very popular comedy at the time “Sportloto-82” by Leonid Gaidai. When acting started to seem to not be enough, Arlauskas graduated from filmmaking studies at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. As a director and a screenwriter, Arlauskas made more than twenty documentary films, two feature films and several short films. In 1991 he moved to Bilbao, Spain. Arlauskas is one of the founders of the cinema school “Ánima Eskola”, which he is the head of to this day. Arlauskas Pinedo received a Sergei Eisenstein award, also won grand prix at the international cinema festival Cinema without Barriers.

Selected Filmography

Madmen’s Conspiracy , 2016
Patria, 2011
Winner, 2008
Country Barber , 2006
Letter to My Mother , 2001
To Live and Die in Russia , 1991–1994
Travelling the Distance , 1990
Non-personal file , 1988
Touch , 1987