Mantas KvedaraviÃÂius (23 June 1976 â 30 March 2022) was a Lithuanian filmmaker, anthropologist, and archaeologist known for war reporting in hostile areas. He was killed during the Siege of Mariupol.
KvedaraviÃÂius held a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and was an associate professor at Vilnius University. His doctoral thesis was titled "Knots of absence: death, dreams, and disappearances at the limits of law in the counter-terrorism zone of Chechnya" (Cambridge University, 2012). War-torn Chechnya, one of the republics of the Russian Federation, is also the setting of his 2011 documentary film, Barzakh ("Limbo").
His next documentary film, in 2016, focused on the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in 2014âÂÂ15 and attacks on it by separatist troops. In 2019, KvedaraviÃÂius's first feature film was released, entitled Partenonas (Parthenon), and set in Athens, Odesa, and Istanbul. Based on several years of ethnographic research, it explores the enigmatic workings of memory. In arresting, often disconnected images, the pivotal character revives various lives he may have lived: "Memories betray him, but he knows for sure that in one of these lives, he will be killed."
Working on yet another Mariupol documentary, KvedaraviÃÂius was killed on 30 March 2022 during the Siege of Mariupol. Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine's ombudsperson for human rights, alleged that he "was taken prisoner by 'rashists', who later shot him. The occupiers threw the director's body out into the street". KvedaraviÃÂius's fiancée, Hanna Bilobrova, reported that a Russian soldier led her to his body two days after his death. She said that he had been shot in the stomach, but there was "no blood on the ground" and no bullet hole in the clothes he was wearing. Bilobrova brought his body home to Lithuania.
KvedaraviÃÂius' killing was condemned by Audrey Azoulay, director general of Unesco, in a press release published on 6 April 2022. According to global monitoring on the safety of journalists by the Unesco Observatory of Killed Journalists, KvedaraviÃÂius was the ninth media professional killed by Russian forces inÃÂ Ukraine in 2022.