Latvia

At the beginning of the 1960s, when the French pioneers of cinéma vérité set out to achieve a new realism, and when direct cinema in Québec began to vie for notice, the Baltics witnessed the birth of a generation of documentarists who favored a more romantic view of the world around them. This meditative documentary essay – from a Latvian writer and Lithuanian director whose composed touch has long dovetailed with the stylistically diverse works of the Baltic New Wave – pushes adroitly past the limits of the common historiographic investigation to create a portrait of less-clearly remembered filmmakers. The result is a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation. Or a cinematic poem about cinema poets.Read More »

A solitary cat, displaced by a great flood, finds refuge on a boat with various species and must navigate the challenges of adapting to a transformed world together.Read More »

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Adam’s first wife Lilith is mentioned in ancient Oriental legends, in Talmud and in the medieval books of Cabala. According to these sources, she was not created from Adam’s rib like Eve but from clay like he himself. Nevertheless Lilith was not recognized by Adam as his equal and left him after a quarrel heading for Babylon where pre-Adamians lived. She has no soul, and she is immortal. Lilith assumes different names, can change her appearance, and takes possession of men against their will. Once it’s accomplished, she leaves her victims forever, marking them for either spiritual, or physical death. Whatever she does it is neither Good nor Evil. She is made of an altogether different matter. The story consists of three interrelated stories: “Escape” (1664, Hanseatic League); “Loss” (1883, Russian Empire/France); “Aberration Feelings” (1990, Latvia).Read More »

Imants Veide is writing a script about con artists and their schemes. Together with his friend Harijs Kuharjonoks he’s trying them out for real for greater authenticity, but gets too entangled in real criminal schemes.Read More »

Drawing on his own archive, lauded filmmaker Vitaly Mansky gives a close account of a turning point in Russia’s recent history. In a surprise move on December 31, 1999, the first president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin handed over the reins to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Witnesses covers his first year in power. Putin led the country back to Soviet-style nationalism, and has employed tyrannical methods to remain in power ever since. That knowledge casts an eerie shadow over the filmed material.Read More »

The story of a film “Commission” starts in Georgia at some unknown point of time where a heroic, mythical female character has written a book which is being delivered by a courier (the artist herself) to three powerful women. The content of a book is hidden within an existing book – “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin” written by Medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli who dedicated the book to 12th century Queen Tamar who at the time brought prosperity and many social changes in the country. Being used as a secret shell or a reference to female power from the past, the freshly embedded content of a book serves as manifesto to the women who haven’t been equally appreciated due to history books still being written from male perspective. The book offers alternative gaze to a world history which can exist only in utopian science-fiction film commissioned and executed by females only.Read More »

Elina returns to the summer house of her childhood to show it to buyers. The visceral presence of her dead grandmother forces her to reflect on the legacy of failing familial relations – and how she and her mother are approaching a similar fate.Read More »

A personal, animated documentary about the director’s life growing up in Latvia during the Soviet era 1970-1990, where Sovjet used WW2 as an ideological weapon to suppress and scare the population.Read More »

A resourceful teenage girl fights – literally, on occasion – to cling to her modest dreams for the future when the realities of life in rural Latvia threaten to rent apart what’s left of her family. Not that there is much of Raya’s (Elīna Vaska) immediate clan still around. Following the death of their father, she and her younger brother Robis (Andžejs Jānis Lilientāls) live in a state of low-level warfare with their acidic paternal grandmother, in a cottage surrounded by churned mud. Raya has invested her hopes in her mother, who emigrated to the UK and has lost contact with her children.Read More »