The film had its premiere in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival (7 - 17 August 2024), where it received the Best Director Award, and the award for Best Performance for Gelminė Glemžaitė, Agnė Kaktaitė, Giedrius Kiela and Paulius Markevičius.

Together with her sister Justė‘s family, Ernesta, her husband Lukas, and their son Kristupas are spending their weekend at a country house after her husband‘s victory in a mixed-martial arts tournament. The two families spend their time swimming in a nearby lake, having dinner and discussing family finances. After a near tragic accident, the sisters become single mothers and the second part of the film will follow their life in the aftermath of the tragedy.

"Drowning Dry is essentially about a group of people dealing with an almost tragic event that causes them experience emotional trauma in different ways. I used irregular repetition borrowed from the dry drowning condition as a structural element of the story in order to highlight the various ways of receiving and dealing with trauma. It helped me to organically merge story, subject and theme into one”, the director told FNE in February 2024.

Klementina Remeikaite of Lithuanian Afterschool produced the film in coproduction with Matiss Kaza of Latvian Trickster Pictures, and with support from the Lithuanian Film Centre, the National Film Centre of Latvia, Eurimages, LRT and the Latvian broadcaster.

Drowning Dry, which will be theatrically released in Lithuania on 20 September 2024, is the second film by Bareiša to be selected as Lithuania’s candidate for the Oscars, after Pilgrims / Pilgrimai (Afterschool) in 2022.