Description

Recently, the French Institute in Lithuania celebrated its 25th anniversary. I am happy that I have been able to witness the Institute’s life both from the sidelines and, at times, as a more active participant. Yet my friendship with French culture stretches back, one might say, to my birth. I am Lithuanian, born in Lithuania in the town of Užpaliai, and through my parents’ native tongue I share the very same Latin alphabet with the French: only written Lithuanian has 32 letters, while French has 26. My love for France began with the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, followed by Alexandre Dumas’s novels “The Black Tulip” and “The Three Musketeers,” and Alphonse Daudet’s profoundly sensitive work “Letters from My Windmill”… It is precisely this sensibility that I imagine is the second reason I love the French and France.

My first professional encounter with Francophonie occurred just after Lithuania regained its Independence, when an international children’s theater festival took place in Panevėžys. As a third-year journalism student at the Vilnius University Faculty of Communication, I reported on the event and interviewed Arlette, the director of a children’s theater troupe from the South of France. Over more than three decades in the Lithuanian media, I have published over two hundred texts on Francophone themes, half of them interviews with prominent figures in French culture and art. These are mere statistics, a kind of bookkeeping that naturally cannot capture the emotional bond I share with the world capital of culture, fashion, and gastronomy. Nor could it, even if I had tallied the glasses of champagne savored at various Francophone events, exhibition openings, or launches of books, films, and perfumes, or the tête-à-tête meetings that eventually blossomed into the “Tête-à-tête” event cycle organized by the French Institute.

I am deeply grateful to the people I have met—especially my family and my colleagues from the editorial offices where I have worked—that this exhibition of publications, where every page and every depicted encounter is a separate story in itself, might illustrate even a fraction of the enduring strength of the cultural ties between Lithuania and France. These are ties that truly awakened a century ago, at the dawn of diplomatic relations between the two nations in 1922. Ties that were never entirely severed or silenced by the Soviet occupation, when even during the authoritarian regime in Moscow, amid the chill of the Cold War, we could still occasionally catch a French film, hear Mireille Mathieu or Joe Dassin, and read François Rabelais, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and many 19th-century classics. And today, fortunately, we can experience essentially everything: from Marcel Proust and Albert Camus to Frédéric Beigbeder and Annie Ernaux; from the Lumière brothers to François Ozon; from Charles Aznavour to Aya Nakamura…

I would like to dedicate the exhibition “My France: 25 Years of Love” to the French language teachers of my native Užpaliai gymnasium: Rena Šliogerienė and Kazimieras Kuliešius, who departed to eternity many years ago.

Cordially yours –
Valdas Puteikis, journalist

The exhibition will be open until September 20, 2026.