A biopic of Rainis (born as Jānis Pliekšāns), a Latvian poet, playwright, translator, and politician, whose works had a profound influence on the literary Latvian language, and the ethnic symbolism he employed in his major works has been central to Latvian nationalism.
One night, Matiss Zelcs, an employee of the Latvian national archive in Riga, notices a woman on a bridge. After passing by her without preventing her suicidal fall into the depths, a sensation of failure and guilt changes his life. He cannot forget her. Driven by a feeling of remorse and the fever of illusion, he roams through the city night and day looking for traces of her existence. This journey through the tumult of his conscience leads him deeper into his own loneliness and the depths of his soul, as he gets more and more entangled in the destinies of the woman and of the people who were attached to her. He finds himself confronted with the pain of yearning and guilt, the cruelty of love and desire, and the search for forgiveness, release and salvation.
Every day, come rain or shine, Theodore used to bike the seven kilometres from his house to the centre of the village to sit and drink beer in the bus stop. For him, no doubt, this place was the centre of the Universe. With his death, the centre has moved elsewhere, and the bus stop is just a bus stop again.
“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now...
A charcoal on paper animation about a motorcycling circus bear who decides to leave the daily routine and takes off to the forest where his true happiness seems to dwell. Selected at 70+ film festivals. International Festival Premier at Clermont-Ferrand 34th Int'l Short Film Festival, France, 2012.
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.
There is a popular Latvian folksong which begins with the phrase "I was singing out high on a mountain". The irony of it is that according to physical geography there are no mountains in Latvia. So what exactly is the place where the Latvians are "singing out"? It may be safely said that it's the same place where they are skiing. That's how we make mountains out of molehills...Snow-covered mountains, to be sure.
This documentary deals with faith, human aging, a struggle to fulfill your vision and above all - one particular building. In its poetical minimalism the film observes the construction of the new Latvian National Library, which has become a metaphor for a temple, a boiling-point for an entire nation.
Sixteen year old student Jānis has been given an interesting home work assignment – to draw his family tree and tell about it. The story of his family begins with his great-great-grandfather, who burned down the manors of German landowners during the 1905 revolution. My Family Tree takes us on a journey to various countries and political regimes, showing Jānis’s ancestors to be people with diverse fates and life stories. A rich Latvian trader, a red rifleman loyal to Lenin, a carpenter at the KGB and war refugees in Sweden are only a few branches on his family tree, and the boy has heard something unusal and unforgettable about each and every one of these people.
During a rainy day, an old Japanese man boards a ferry heading towards an unknown island. As he looks out over the water, the falling rain leads him back in time towards two moments from his past. The only constant is the rain, a woman and Mount Fuji.