The Invisible Front

When Russia occupied Lithuania after WWII, a section of the population refused to submit to the communists' rule of fear. This resistance force played a game of cat-and-mouse with the Russians in the Lithuanian countryside for years, costing many their lives. These partisans – a ragtag band of simple country folk and patriotic students with little, if any, formal military training – waged guerrilla warfare on the occupying Soviet army. The film focuses on perhaps the most significant of these resistance fighters, Juozas Lukša, an architecture student who quickly rose through the ranks due to his innate ability to lead.

The film features interviews with many of the surviving rebels, former KGB agents, the presidents of Lithuania and Latvia, and Lukša’s widow, Nijolė Bražėnaitė. Supplementary footage and documents from the CIA and KGB archives tell the story of a war fought completely in secret to the West – a war known amongst the Soviet Interior Forces as “The Invisible Front”.