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ENSince the invention of cinema, Lithuania (or at least its current territory) has experienced a number of political changes that directly influenced the development of film making and archiving. Perhaps the most important are those that occurred during the period of Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Before the Soviet occupation a film industry hardly existed in Lithuania, although there were a few amateur attempts at establishing studios and schools. The best known of them are the film acting school (1931–1933) established by Jonas Vaičkus, the Lietfilm studio, and the Akis production house. However, even with a lively film culture in larger cities, no preservation or structural keeping of films existed until the Soviet occupation. The Soviet system of filmmaking, distribution and preservation in Lithuania was comparable to that of the other countries in a similar position, which means it was centralised and subordinated to state institutions in Moscow. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other communist governments in the Eastern Bloc, Lithuania emerged as a sovereign nation. As a result, government institutions were restructured and the media was now in the hands of Lithuania. In 1990, the newly restored and independent country, with its own film studios (in 1989, Kinema, the first independent film studio, was established), archive, television and film distributors, had to adopt new standards of national and international workflows. Each of the new post-Soviet republics dealt with these problems differently but the main issue for most of the film industries was the conflict between the old socialist and the new capitalist orientations, which ultimately required some kind of change. These changes were in some cases rushed and in others postponed. These decisions were responsible for the differences in the film industries in the ex-Soviet republics.