There is a remarkable duality running through the work of Algimantas Vidugiris: he turned his camera toward events shaping the future, as well as toward traces of a past receding into the depths of time. The construction of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Power Plant, the lives of people working on the Naryn River, the ancient monuments of Issyk-Kul, a changing city, childhood, human memory — all of this became the material of his films.

The theme of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Power Plant ran through a whole series of his films. Built during the years when Vidugiris was filming its birth, the plant has continued for decades to supply clean electricity to the cities and villages of Kyrgyzstan. Algimantas Vidugiris himself took part in the construction of the plant and, by the vote of the Naryngidroenergostroy builders, was named Builder No. 1 of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Power Plant. Later, in the film Report on a Legend, Vidugiris's film crew was the first to discover a sunken city, more than two and a half thousand years old, at the bottom of Lake Issyk-Kul.

Yet the scope of his creative interests was far broader. Alongside large-scale themes of construction and historical inquiry, his cinematic world encompassed childhood and human memory in Castles in the Sand, a generation of city dwellers in The Boy in Glasses, and an exploration of the pre-Christian past of Eurasian peoples in the projects Forgotten Gods of Eurasia and Bugu Ene: Mother Deer.

For this reason, his films can be seen not merely as works of documentary or narrative cinema, but as a kind of investigation into time itself. Vidugiris did not simply aim to record an event. He returned to his subjects and themes, observed how they changed, and merged the director's direct presence with an artistic reflection on what was unfolding. As a result, his films, made decades ago, continue to function simultaneously as testimonies of their era and as independent works of art.

In this sense, the Algimantas Vidugiris Award is an attempt to carry forward the principle at the heart of his work: to look closely at the present, to find the human being within a specific event, and to see, beyond today, the time that has yet to become history.

"Vidugiris didn't film history — he filmed the present. But that is precisely why his films have become history today. He filmed the present with a visionary sense of the future. I would like the Algimantas Vidugiris Award to support filmmakers who look just as closely at their own time, understanding that one day it too will become history."