St. John’s Night is a traditional midsummer Latvian celebration where family and friends get together to build bonfires, drink and have a good time. According to a legend, on this night lovers and those who wish to fall in love can search the woods for the "magic fern".
“As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling” - thus said Mozart about death. Mozart died in 1791 and was buried in a mass grave, as standard at the time in Vienna for a person of his social and financial situation. In 2000, 452 of Riga’s deceased — people without relatives, the homeless and the unidentified — were buried at the Jaunciems cemetery. But this film is not about death: it's about Mozart, The Magic Flute, Riga, and love. A short commissioned for the Latvian exhibition at Venice Biennale.
The movie shows a young man's life dramatically changed after his friend is murdered. It is ironic - if to look with today's eyes - and nostalgia evoking portrait of marginal society and environment in the early 1990s with allusions to the western cinema - film noir related themes, surrealistic features, avantgard cinema stylization and formal aesthetics.
A tragicomic story about the passions and commotions behind the closed doors of communal flats in Riga.
The shy scientist Lars decides to publish a small ad in order to find a girlfriend. From the 218 replies, he selects Brigita, an attractive Latvian woman and invites her to Stockholm. But what actually happens after Brigita's arrival is far more complicated than Lars could ever have imagined.
An autobiographical work from Herz Frank. Images guide us through the countries in which he worked, interspersed with fragments from his earlier films: births, autopsies, circumcisions, prisoners awaiting execution and other shocking themes.
The ferry crosses the river, transporting people from one shore to the other, from one country to another. It runs year round, never stopping. The footage was filmed on the Latvian-Belarussian border in the early 1990s - a time when the Soviet Union began to crumble and Latvia regained its independence.
In a Latvian bakery, Aina breaks 40000 eggs per day by hand, and she has done this monotone job for almost 20 years.
17-year-old Ria is a sensitive and mysterious young woman. Ria's mother has suffered in a car accident and has stopped speaking since her daughter's birth. The family grows deer for sale, yet, the business is not successful. To earn some money, her father decides to organize a hunt.
Four Latvian legionnaires are sentenced to death for deserting the German army. A Latvian girl heads to the German headquarters to try to free her beloved. In the few hours remaining before the execution a love triangle plays out between the girl, a German officer and the prisoner.
Actress Indra Burkovska tells the story of her father Aleksandrs and his large family, and life on the farm through the 20th century when the farmer was both a master and a slave to his land. Aleksandrs presents a gift to the Ethnographic Open Air Museum that was his life’s dream – a threshing machine Imanta.
A portrait of the witty, artistic, and at times sarcastic Latvian composer Mārtiņš Brauns.
An emotional and stylistically consistent documentary musical depicting the staging of Bernstein’s West Side Story with deaf youths. The dramatic material is intertwined with life and the emotional scenes of the musical; it creates a distinctive choreography, which is a statement of the deaf people’s craving to love this world and to be open. Reciting to music, which is the way of singing of the deaf, is the strongest and most unexpected witness of the realities of their world.
A young woman, Regina, has been killed in her apartment. Investigator Anderson holds Regina’s husband as a suspect for a murder because he is unable to remember his location at the time of the fateful event. Gradually, Anderson is convinced that Oto has not only killed his wife, but he also tries to hide his true identity – notorious criminal Schmit.
Wedding rituals and a love triangle.
A documentary about the Latvian pop singer Mārtiņš Freimanis who died at the early age of 33. The director of this film, Arvīds Krievs, has directed two films starring Freimanis as an actor, and had an intimate connection with him as they were neighbours and Freimanis trusted him more than the journalists or reporters who interviewed him. Arvīds Krievs had planned to make a film about the singer for a few years, so he filmed the singer's life extensively.
A teenage boy and his uncle compete for the love of a prostitute.
The characters of the movie are closely twisted. Each of the heroes is a slave to their own passions. Only through strong will and some happy event they will be able to free themselves from their addictions.
Viesturs Kairišs’ 2004 documentary The Monument investigates the interpretation of Riga’s Soviet Second World War memorial in the post-Soviet era. The "Victory Monument" was established by the Soviets to celebrate freeing Latvia from Nazi Germany. However, for Latvians, this didn't mean "freedom", it meant the beginning of another occupation of their country - this time, by Soviet Union. Included in the collection "Europe's old new faces : Ten countries, ten young directors. Ten stories about monuments situated somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow".
