(Reuters) -Lithuanian film director Mantas Kvedaravicius was killed on Saturday in Ukraine’s Mariupol, a city whose fate he had documented for many years, according to the Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s information agency and a colleague.
“While trying to leave Mariupol, Russian occupiers killed Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravicius,” the agency tweeted https://twitter.com/armyinformcomua/status/1510400551019859972 on Sunday.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
“We lost a creator well known in Lithuania and in the whole world, who until the very last moment, in spite of danger, worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said on Sunday.
Kvedaravicius, who was to turn 46 this year, was best known for his conflict-zone documentary “Mariupolis”, which premiered at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival.
The film paints a portrait of Mariupol, a strategic port is in the breakaway region of Donetsk where pro-Russian fighters have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Kvedaravicius was born in 1976, studied at Vilnius University and got a degree in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, according to the Lithuanian president’s office.
“(…) Mantas Kvedaravicius, was murdered today in Mariupol, with a camera in his hands, in this shitty war of evil, against the whole world,” Russian film director Vitaly Mansky, founder of the festival Artdocfest in which Kvedaravicius was a participant, said on Facebook.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by William Mallard and Raissa Kasolowsky)
