The action and emotions are focused on three main characters: the little boy nicknamed Vanadziņš, his playmate, the kitten, and Vanadziņš’s father, the fisherman. Monumentally laconic, with precise, emotionally effective details; tragedy without affectation and sentimentality, it is the aesthetically the most solid of Arnolds Burovs’s films.
This tale (about a rich man stealing poor man's magic mill or magic grinder) is the first stop-motion animation film by the Riga Motion Picture Studio, created by four professional puppeteers from the Latvian Puppet Theatre and directed by Arnolds Burovs. The film constituted a successful beginning for a stable and long-standing tradition and is evidence of the intuitive skills of the filmmaker required for stop-motion animation, namely, the ability to work with precision and economy of expression.
A cinematographic animation film directed by Jānis Cimmermanis. The screenplay is based on a work by Fricis Dziesma published in 1948, on the tradition of grain threshing in the Kurzeme region. Alongside the human lives, there are also the joys and woes of the little animals, and the lively whirl of intertwining events carries the viewer into the distant past, perhaps recognizing the fond memories shared by their parents or grandparents.
She comes at night, quiet as a cat, to take his sleep away until he feeds her. All she needs is milk brought by him somewhere between sleep and reality. Her name is Insomnia.