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Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), Lithuanian-born poet, philosopher and film-maker, has made hundreds of films and set up the Anthology Film Archive. He emigrated to American in 1949 where he earned the title of 'the godfather of American avant-garde cinema'. [Listener: Amy Taubin; date recorded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: I was born in Lithuania in a small village of 20 families. When I was like 10 years old, I counted how many people there were, and when I counted there were 98 people in that village. In the north part of Lithuania, about 60 miles south of Riga, which is in Latvia already, and I was born on December 24th 1922, though in my passport it says 23rd December, because I never... where I come from, nobody pays much attention to birthdays. This is some kind of further Western kind of idea, Western Europe and etc. We never celebrated our birthdays and it never, I had problems of remembering, so when first I had to tell my birthday, I said December 23rd, and though, you know, it's the 24th. So in my passport it's 23rd and I don't want to correct it because if I ask them to correct it, they may send me back to Lithuania, or something like that, which Lithuanian immigrants now, there are students and artists who come, they consider that the worst punishment to them would be they would be sent back to Lithuania! In any case, in a small village, farming my, on a farm and that's where I grew up with, in a family of father, mother and five, five of, six of us - one sister and five boys.
