LEFT-HANDED PEN

Synopsis

It's a sunny summer day at a suburban school. Schoolteacher Velta gazes at pupils celebrating the end of their final exam. Her son Paulius is there. Velta is distracted by knocking on a classroom door.
Helped by a colleague working at an exam committee, Velta secretly reads Paulius’ answer sheet. Velta realises that it’s so poorly written that her son doesn’t stand a chance to get into his dream university abroad.
The university is prestigious, Velta and her son invested too much to give up now. So, Velta decides to cheat. She convinces her colleague to hold answer sheets until she gets Paulius’ left-handed pen and fixes the work herself.
The film explores sacrifices a mother is willing to make to secure her child's success, raising questions about ethics and the pressures of education.

Statement of the director

A teacher can easily recognise their student by their handwriting, the graphologist can identify the person by analysing the handwriting, and when we sign documents, we confirm that we take responsibility. So, when I started thinking about accepting failure out of respect for another person's freedom to make mistakes, a simple thing such as a pen became an inspiration.
The pen became a metaphor of authenticity that cannot be faked and a motive for the script plot development. For Velta, who is controlling and attached to her son, only a fundamental connection between the young person's identity and the possibility to learn from one's mistakes can make her accept a bad exam result. Perhaps it is sometimes harder to accept responsibility by letting go of it?
I mostly care about the journey of Velta. The outer journey – dealing with the obstacles along the way – and the inner journey – finding the limits of her relationship with her son. The hardest thing here is to separate her son's decisions and their consequences from her own and maintain respect for the other's freedom to make mistakes.
The story is set in a school, among the pupils who, for the film, give the story the characteristics of a coming-of-age story. Only in this case, the story is inverted: the pains of learning here are experienced not by a teenager trying to find himself, but by a forty-something woman searching for herself and her relationship with her son.