Between one session in the conference room and the next, there was practically no time for picture taking. I wasn’t there for tourism, anyway: I was in Vilnius as a tutor, helping human rights defenders figure out how to prepare for presenting their work to documentary filmmakers in Warsaw come December.

Though it was my first visit to Lithuania, I was engrossed in my work, determined to prove myself on my first project with Warsaw’s Helsinki Foundation. So the camera stayed in the bag, and out it came only on the long walk from our hotel to the city’s flagship library, where we watched a shockingly good selection of several shortish films, including Atomic Soldiers, a master class in how less really is everything when done well.

There are many ways this note might run long. I could go into detail about all four of the instructive shorts that we saw, each a prototypical example of a distinct documentary style. I could introduce the people I got to know—driven activists from a half-dozen countries plus a few tireless film festival mavens. I could list what I learned over the course of the workshop, like how Lithuania’s largest lockdown-style social care home is housed in what was once a concentration camp—and what a struggle it is to get people and governments to support re-integration. And of course I could elaborate on the Strategic Guide to Pitching I used in my work.

Alternatively, I could talk about my mother’s family’s Vilnian roots, severed abruptly not long before World War Two, which incidentally began on the day before the day she was born. Or I could revisit the conference at UCONN, because it was there that my involvement with Future Docs and the Watch Docs Film Festival first ignited. Finally, I could go on about Lithuania’s capital city itself—refined, solid, and uncluttered in that Northern way, inhabited by first- and second-generation Vilnians intent on turning house into home. I could but I won’t, though perhaps I just did just a little, but I shouldn’t have to: the pictures can do the talking.