A canceled Lithuanian martial arts champion finds refuge in a Taiwanese family’s restaurant as he tries to piece his life back together in China Sea, a hard-hitting drama about the weight of guilt and second chances from director Jurgis Matulevičius (Isaac, 2019) and writer Saulė Bliuvaite, whose feature directorial debut Toxic won the top award at Locarno 2024.
The movie, inspired by the real-life story of a Lithuanian fighter, world premiered at the29th editionof theTallinn Black Nights Film Festival(PÖFF) in Estonia, where it just won the Critics’ Picks Competition.
“Champion fighter Osvald (Marius Repšys) is banned from competing after injuring a girl in a street fight,” reads a synopsis for the film. “Stranded in his bleak Lithuanian hometown, he takes refuge in a run-down Taiwanese restaurant owned by his only friend, Ju-Long. Court-ordered therapy leads him to Skaistė, a woman who offers a glimpse of a life he’s never known. But as Osvald clings to this fragile hope, his violent past resurfaces, forcing him to choose between redemption and self-destruction.”
The cast also features Jag Huang, Severija Janusauskaite, Sonia Yuan, and Vaidotas Martinaitis. Ieva Cern and Stasys Baltakis produced the film, with co-producers Amy Ma, Marta Gmosinska, Mariusz Włodarski, Jakub Košťál, and Vratislav Šlajer.
Watch a trailer for China Sea here.
THR spoke to the film’s director and writer about putting China Sea together as the first-ever co-production between Lithuania and Taiwan, mixing a true story and fiction, and exploring the dark sides of humanity in a proudly gritty style.
“This story is inspired by a real person, a real fighter from Lithuania, who was a superstar in Asia, especially in Japan, in the early 2000s. He was a world superstar, really well known abroad,” explains director Matulevičius. “So, some producers came to me and asked if I wanted to do a biopic about this guy, but they said that this film would be praising him. I Googled him, and I saw that yes, he was a superstar, but he was also a very controversial figure, so I would not praise him in a biopic. That’s not my style.”
So, “Jurgis rejected the idea, but the story stayed in our heads because this guy came from my hometown,” recalls Bliuvaite. “And I was reading a lot about the stories that would come out. He was a superstar outside of his home country, but at home, he was known for very violent incidents and being associated with a bad crowd.”
And he was shot in 2015 with an automatic rifle. There was another man that the filmmaking duo was curious about. In Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, there was a small Asian restaurant called China Sea. “You would see this middle-aged Asian guy just standing there [outside the restaurant] all isolated and smoking all the time,” she explains. “And so for me it became very interesting to explore this immigrant story in Lithuania,” adds Matulevičius.
A common theme between the two men struck him. “These are two very different people, but they both live their lives in a certain isolation. This kickboxing superstar feels isolated because he comes home and nobody really thinks of him as a star. And this family is trying to run an Asian restaurant in Lithuania, which is also an isolating experience. So, we felt that there was a connection there.”
‘China Sea’
China Sea starts off with actual TV footage of a fight with German commentary, taken from Eurosport, meshed together with footage filmed with the movie’s lead actor. This writer must admit he could not tell, to which the director replies: “It’s edited for you not to know. This first scene is to show his super-stardom.”
Frustration, rage, and toxic masculinity all play into his challenges in finding a path in life that leaves him satisfied, though. “Our main character has a man’s body, but his mindset is still stuck in his teenage years,” explains Matulevičius. “The world is changing, but you’re still stuck in your teenage years, where you probably lived in a poor neighborhood, your role models were men full of toxic masculinity, and you tried to be a part of their world, because otherwise you would be a sissy, and they didn’t show you any emotions. So, you only know anger and violence, and you can’t express yourself because you were taught that men don’t cry, men are strong, and don’t have feelings. I think that’s the tragedy of our main character.”
He is hoping for a transformation, though. “He starts thinking, ‘I’m probably doing something wrong, and I need to change. I need to be a better person’,” says the director. “And he tries to do that. He starts training kids and befriends these immigrants, and tries to help them in the restaurant.”
Bliuvaite chimes in, saying: “He is trying to go on a path of healing. And you see these monks and psycho-therapy, while at the same time, you see crimes happening.” Only when she saw the final version of the movie did the writer fully realize something. “This is a film about people who try to heal personally while being ignorant about what’s happening around them,” she tells THR.
The title China Sea, representing a huge hurdle you must overcome to get to the other side where you want to be, is “a straight-up metaphor that was in the script in the early stages of this project,” the writer adds.
‘China Sea’
The China Sea duo also shares some insight that you may not realize as a viewer. For example, the man playing the protagonist’s coach was the actual coach of the real-life fighter who was the inspiration for the movie.
“When we introduced this sea metaphor to the coach, I remember very vividly that he became emotional because he felt that connection to the person he knew, and this idea that you try to be better, but this [ocean] is getting bigger and bigger,” says Bliuvaite.
Director Matulevičius had a cinematic inspiration for China Sea as well, The Work, a 2017 documentary from directors Gethin Aldous and Jairus McLeary that also deals with rehabilitation, and in an even more direct way. “Set inside a single room in Folsom Prison, three men from the outside participate in a four-day group-therapy retreat with a group of incarcerated men for a real look at the challenges of rehabilitation,” reads a synopsis for it.
The main China Sea actor, Repšys, did martial arts for 10 years when he was younger, so he knew how to move and “had the look,” Matulevičius tells THR about his casting choice. “But, of course, for him, it was a really tough preparation, because when I invited him to be in this part, he weighed 110 kilos, and I told him he needed to be 84. And he said, ‘Okay, I will do it.’ And he was really committed.”
The Taiwanese casting seemed somewhat surreal to the director, though. “I went to Taiwan, and they were introducing me to some people. And I see these stars. And I was wondering: Can we get them? Do they really want to do this film? The actor playing the restaurant owner [Jag Huang (Life of Pi)] was acting in Ang Lee films. And Sonia [Yuan] was in Drive My Car. But they said, yes, they’re really interested in traveling to a Baltic country.”
‘China Sea’
Probably the hardest scene to shoot in China Sea, from a technical standpoint, is what the creative team simply calls “the ice scene.” “For that shot, we needed an ice hole to be in the middle of this lake,” the director recalls. “Our health and safety supervisors told us we couldn’t do that. But we could do it if we put strings on the actors. So, that’s what we did. And then, for two months, we were deleting the strings in post-production. It was a very tiring job.”
The China Sea creative duo does not have another major joint project lined up, instead working on their own new ideas. But she and Matulevičius like to share their ideas and script drafts, Bliuvaite emphasizes. “We understand each other very well, and it’s a big help,” she shares. “And we give each our our honest, brutal opinion. Not everyone can do that.”
Matulevičius shares this much about a film he wants to do next – he hopes it will take him from the wetness of the sea to a focus on dry sand. “I want to go back in time to the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries in the Curonian Spit,” he shares. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is a thin, curved sand-dune spit that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea and is shared by Lithuania and Russia. In the lagoon, in past times, there was a lot of sand carried around by the winds. Explains the director: “It would drown people’s houses, so they needed to relocate all the time.”