Leningrad, August 1991. TV broadcasts “The Swan Lake”. City streets fill with anxious people. There are rumours a coup has taken place, but there is no sure information from Moscow.
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Seventeen-year-old Sangaile dreams of flying but has a terrible fear of heights. At an air-show she meets a peer named Auste. Flirtatious and confident, Auste is a complete opposite of Sangaile; however, Auste earns Sangaile’s trust and learns her biggest secret.
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Saul, a prisoner at Auschwitz who is forced to work at the camp’s crematorium assigns a special meaning to the last days of his life by deciding to bury a corpse of a little boy in accordance with Jewish traditions.
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In a near future, single people are forced to go the Hotel where within 45 days they must find a partner, or they will be made into animals. When David’s (Colin Farrell) attempts at winning favour with the women at the Hotel fall through, and the allotted period of time is dangerously getting closer, he runs away and joins the rebellious Loners who live in the woods, where he unfortunately falls in love.
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This is a sad tale of a life and death illuminated by the paparazzi flashes – of singer Amy Winehouse’s brilliant career and her untimely death.
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If Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino made a film together, this is what it would look like: an eccentric Western consisting equally of romance, adventure, action and black humour.
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Proximity of nature makes people question their existence. A father and daughter, played by Šarunas Bartas himself and his actual daughter, spend a weekend in the country, trying come to terms with why they have grown apart.
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Five young sisters are running on a country path, their hair waving in the air like mane. But this summer everything will change in an instant: after the sisters have begun an innocent game with their classmates, their conservative grandmother and uncle decide to marry them off, with or without their consent.
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The unusual life of Polish anti-communist Adam Jacek Winkler is reanimated in a stylistically brilliant animation film based on Winkler’s drawings, photographs, and diaries. Winkler leaves his home country and settles in Paris; he is an ardent, impulsive and cynical adrenaline addict.
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In the newly founded Soviet Union, where people still honestly believe in a bright future, Polina, a commander of the Red Army, and her friends, avant-garde artists (a composer, a director, a sculptor, an architect, and a theatre director), are sent to the north of Russia to convince, using cultural methods, the local tribes of the advantages of the new government.
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Brothers Gummi and Kiddi are sheep-farmers who pride themselves with the best flocks in Iceland. And yet although they have a common job, and their sheep have a common ancestor, the brothers have not spoken in decades.
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Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived a queen who wanted to have a child so much she was ready to sacrifice everything; a princess who dreamed of marrying a strong and handsome prince; a king who fell in love with a mysterious owner of a beautiful voice…
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Eastern Europe, 1835. Two riders cross a barren landscape in the middle of Wallachia. They are the gendarme Costandin and his son. Together they are searching for a “gypsy slave” who has run away from his nobleman master and is suspected of having an affair with the noble’s wife.
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The films of Nanni Moretti, who could be Woody Allen’s Italian cousin, are tragicomedies of the everyday – they bring together humour, vulnerability, and a deep understanding of a human life, with all its joys and sorrows.
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Célestine arrives in a sleepy village from Paris to start a job as a chambermaid with the Lanlaires, a bourgeois couple. The young woman is received by a harassing host, his sadistic wife, and a cold treatment from the rest of the servants.
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Argentina is on the verge of a collapse, as is, perhaps, the rest of the world. A man joins a group of people in a strange training camp in the jungle. Trainees are taught various survival skills while also get to understand that when the society goes down its self-governing laws will no longer apply – a realization that awakens their darkest instincts.
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Claude is twenty-three; he reads and cycles a lot, is interested in politics, and tries to live aesthetically, but he is also lost in his own life. Barbara will soon turn twenty, she studies acting, believes she’s an optimist, wants to travel and live in Paris.
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Richard, an elderly businessman, suddenly leaves his wife and begins an affair with a younger woman. Meanwhile Maria, Richard’s wife, also meets and spends a night with a younger man. However, their attitudes towards what happened are radically different.
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The Soviet montage pioneer Dziga Vertov is best known as the author of “The Man with the Movie Camera” (1929) who captured the rhythm of modern life in the cities of the young Soviet State.
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The canon of the genre, the film ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, was a collaboration between the leftist intellectual Edgar Morin and the anthropologist Jean Rouch. Using an approach considered cutting-edge for its time, without shying away from revealing the camera and the filmmaking process itself, Rouch and Morin strived to create a reflection of reality as authentic as possible, bringing to life Morin’s concept of cinéma-vérité.
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The Canadian documentary filmmaker Gilles Groulx’s dexterous and dynamic camera follows three amateur boxers while they prepare for a tournament called “Golden Gloves”. A victory in the brutal contest is their hope to break out of poverty. In sincere conversations the boys tell about their love of boxing, dreams, and ambitions.
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After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia experienced a drug epidemic. Zhanna and Aleksey are the survivors; they are in their thirties, living in a small Saint Petersburg apartment with Aleksey’s mother and trying to control their use of heroin.
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Zenya Tsoy is an impression artist who impersonates the grandees of Russian show business, becoming, for example, Filip Kirkorov or the singer Lolita. He is thirty-three, and for many years he has been living with another man, the world’s most charming bus driver.
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During the twentieth century, television became not just a part of our culture and a means of entertainment (they say people spend 10 years of their lives in front of a TV), but also one of the most powerful weapons of the Cold War propaganda.
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A revolution changes the social and political landscape; but first it transforms the actual one. No other European capital city centre had recently looked the way Kiev’s Maidan did a short while ago, resembling a medieval carnival or a futuristic fantasy.
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Donetsk’s airport, named after Sergei Prokofiev, was renovated in 2012, but destroyed two years later in the war between Ukrainian forces and Donetsk separatists. The atrocious battle for the airport – a more symbolic, than strategic, aim – has been shown through the eyes of both sides.
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This film is dedicated to the heroes fallen for Ukraine. A simple, authentic story presents the world-view of the volunteer fighters, participating in the tragic Battle of Ilovaisk in August 2014. Without a voice-over or any other embellishments, this is the film that allows one to sense what war is really like. The author of the film, Ruslan Ganuschak, is a fighter of the controversial AZOV volunteer battalion and a war reporter.
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Abkhazia is one of those “frozen” conflict regions of the former Soviet Union. Its people are proud of their historical heritage and will not let such nuisances like dilapidated houses and regular power shortages to lessen their love of life.
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Twenty years after the unsuccessful attempt to establish independence from Russia, the life in Chechnya’s capital Grozny still verges on the fragile border between war and peace. Archaic traditions and political repression contrast with modern skyscrapers and the longing for freedom.
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The Northwest district of Copenhagen is notorious for its high level of youth crime. The eighteen-year-old Caspar is a petty thief who sells stolen goods to a dealer named Jamal. When Casper gets a chance to join Bjorn’s rivalling gang he believes he will finally be able to escape poverty.
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Erika is a young and talented interior designer who has everything in her life under control, until one day the life gives her something she cannot influence. She falls into depression and begins attending a group therapy.
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“My name is Ingrid and this is my story.”
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Helen, a priest, is asked to visit a teenage boy committed to a psychiatric hospital because he has killed an elderly couple and failed a suicide attempt. The boy believes his act was the will of God.
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The protagonist of the Swedish master Jan Troell’s biographical drama is Torgny Segerstedt, a journalist known for his uncompromising stand on Nazism at the time when most of his contemporaries preferred the diplomatic approach.
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Martin, a boyish thirty-something, goes on a weekend hike in the mountains. But one can never run away from oneself, and, just like many of us, Martin too cannot just be, without analysing his relationship with his wife and their small son, the mundanity of his job, the ever-present sense of alienation…
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Junnu and Raisa meet at a children’s home for problematic youths, a place more like a prison than a social care centre. They steal a car and manage to escape. They end up on a paradise-like island where their journey turns into a surreal trip on drugs, but reality cannot be kept at bay for long.
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The weight of time is very much felt in Kiruna, a nothing-out-of-the-ordinary and yet somehow peculiarly special Swedish polar town, the only thing that literally shakes the town is a coalmine, its only economic resource. The radio is anxiously broadcasting news about a possible disaster.
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Muffled emotional explosions under a seemingly quiet disguise; Norway’s Joachim Trier is a master of bringing an extra dimension to the frame – an invisible yet unmistakably present quality.
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In Stella’s eyes, her elder sister Katya is a true star: she is the apple of their parents’ eye and a talented figure skater who spends her days practising the sport. When Katya’s dedication begins to resemble an obsession while she herself becomes emotionally distant, Stella is the first to find out her sister’s secret and realize its potentially dire consequences.
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During a relatively short period of four years since 2011, the Atom Art studio’s series of short animations entitled “Shammies” has become something of a local sensation, as well as received much praise from across the border. The adorable animated characters explore the world just like their “peers” – the smallest movie-goers – would. This year comes with their newest adventures – the festival will premiere four new Shammies films. In these, Shammies will learn how take care of friends, build a house, do the chores, and play.
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Based on a popular children’s book by a Swedish author Max Lundgren, the story was made into a TV series that quickly became a beloved household name, before it was finally made into an exciting cinematic adventure in the best traditions of the genre.
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What can Matilda do when it’s summer, but it’s raining, and she has to stay indoors? If it were winter, instead of the rain there would be lovely snow. Matilda’s dream of winter holidays can be brought to life by her little friends. Where do they live? In the freezer, of course! The film programme is made possible thanks to the support of EEA Grants un Ministry of Culture Republic of Latvia.
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Ten-year-old Marie believes her parents’ jobs are more important to them than the relationship with her. Luckily, she has a wonderful granddad, a professor with a similar taste for adventure as has she. Marie and her friends are enjoying the summer holidays until the town is exposed to an unknown disease that makes all adults behave like children.
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The Norwegian director Grethe Bøe-Waal’s debut is an excellent example of the Scandinavian family film tradition: a thrilling adventure that tells a story about the key things in life – responsibility for others, especially the family, the skill of mutual understanding, and honesty.
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The film brings to life children’s poems that, through animal characters, tell us about a friendship between the biggest and the smallest, and their joint adventures. What if I were a big bat and you a little one, or if you were a little flee and I were a big flee.
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Three self-conscious, highly-educated pedophiles give an insight in their minds and thoughts. How do you cope with a sexual orientation that’s considered morbid?
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Anna is milking the cows, Jakob smokes pot, Berni works on a telescope and Ulrike celebrates her birthday. So far, everything is fine in Otto’s farm. When Ulrike’s coffee cup breaks on the kitchen floor, something dark breaks loose. Sometimes the devil has to take the hindmost.
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Seven short episodes, each containing one sole image, are combined together in order to create a psychological thriller.
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Object is a creative re-imagination of a rescue mission, taking place in two worlds – on the ice desert and underwater. The film is told from the point of view of the rescue team diver, entering the world under the ice, and of the ordinary people, awaiting on the shore.
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After a casting, 2 filmmakers agree they found the perfect 14 years old girl for their new movie. Still, they must convince the mother to let her play the role of a sexually abused child. What follows is a witty argumentation on parenting and abuses made in the name of of art.
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Coro dos Amantes is made of two “songs” that tell the same suffocating event in two voices from two different perspectives.
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Athens, in the heat of summer. A bunch of schoolkids are hanging out in the yard. The classrooms are empty. The sun is scorching hot. A water bomb falls out of the sky, stirring up a water fight. It’s game on. But in this game, you play till you drop.
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At the seaside beach the fates of a balding sailor, a young girl and two modest creatures – the bee and the crab are entangled. Following their greed, they meet each other by the waffle stall. An animated story about primal desires present in the human nature.
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The film tells the love story of the refugee Patrick and Sara from Berlin, who are fighting together for refugee rights in Berlin. When harmless advance turns into a sexual assault, the group is forced to rethink their aims and the private love story grows to an unwanted public dimension.
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A journey through the abstract situation of a practice of the voluntary fire brigade. It is a poetic, sensuous short film about the construction of reality and the pursuit of meaning and belief.
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A sensitive and introvert teenager lives under the shadow of his mother in Israeli periphery. The film explores questions of marginality and poverty in a Jewish-Arab society searching for its identity.
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Luka moves to a small coastal town to live with his aunt, while his parents are in the middle of divorce. Besides the numbness, there is also Jana – a girl from the neighborhood who likes to take care of her tan. It’s a lazy end of the summer. Kids are jumping from the edge of the abandoned submarine port enjoying last days of vacation. When you are a kid, you never know that childhood ends.
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Collector of cursed musicians, unreasonable murderers, fairground freaks, paranoid revolutionaries, flatulists and suicidal anchorites, a patient in a psychiatric institution presents a gallery of the great names in history who haunt him.
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Home is a place. A family. A history. Relationships. Home is a memory that forms a person. Maybe a dream? This is a story about a girl coming back Home. This visit brings a storm of chaotic, difficult memories. She needs to deal with them to leave.
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A night in the life of Pio, a young Romani boy living in southern Italy.
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When her husband suddenly dies, Karin starts visiting a counselor. Used to being a housewife for years, she feels she has lost her identity. Now Karin has to learn more about herself and plan her income and future. Her husband was a charismatic priest always in the centre of peoples’ attention, earning respect regardless of his flaws and shortcomings. Maybe now it is the time for Karin to take her husband’s place? To become more careless and to look and behave like she has always wanted.
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Four generations, each with a crisis, set in four different parts of Norway on the Norwegian Constitution Day. Ten-year-old Birger hates marching with the boys’ brigade. War hero Konrad (90) refuses to listen to another sumptuous Constitution Day speech. Graduation queen Carina (18) just cannot believe Morten isn’t interested in her. And father-of-two Ola (46) searches for his ‘self’ in a hunting lodge in arctic Svalbard.
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Círio de Nazaré, held in Belém (Brazil) since 1793, is one of the biggest Catholic processions in the world. Each year millions of pilgrims accompany the saint’s statue competing for the privilege of holding the long sisal rope that leads the carriage throughout the city streets. In disarray with the rules of the celebration, and in order to assure their relics, some promisers cut the rope in the middle of the ritual.
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Synthetic, animated figures coexist with elements of realistic images, diverse landscapes meet each other, music tracks of different origins and moods overlap and collide with real sounds of human environment. Sound layer of the film is on par with the visual and literary ones, fully reflecting the basic assumption of the film’s aesthetic: to build an utterance by overlapping contradictory tones, emotions and messages.
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On the 3rd October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and vividly remembers the nightmarish experience. Meanwhile, chaos breaks loose at the harbour, whilst hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship.
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A young journalist, Zane, meets a man, Matīss, who claims to have risen from the dead. Matīss offers Zane to write an article about him, but in exchange wants help finding his wife. Is Matīss a victim, a madman or a skilled impostor?
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Mart dreams of leaving to California. He believes that the grass is much greener at the other side, but when a new opportunity, a much more comfortable one, appears he will have to decide whether to leave or to stay.
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Last night Matas and Tomas kidnapped and raped a girl. Now it’s morning and both are at a loss at what to do next. The brothers circle their hometown, visit familiar places and slowly descend into darkness both will be unable to climb out of. As the night falls they find an inexplicable solution. In 2013, near Panevezys, Lithuania, two young men burned a car. A girl’s body was found in the trunk of the car.
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It is not easy to make sense of the world and grownups’ reasoning if one is only seven years old. This is the story about Justine and the morning of her birthday.
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Pechory is a town on the southeastern border of Estonia and Russia. Most Estonians left the area after the Soviet takeover. To Light is a poetic documentary about a mother and her son, who decided to stay behind when the Estonian town of Petseri became the Russian town of Pechory. After seventy years there is hardly anything Estonian left in the town. Linda and Mart Kallas try to maintain contact with their homeland, but that is no cure for their loneliness. Now they only have each other. The mother needs the son and the son needs the mother. The mother is at the very end of her life. The son is searching for a light in the darkness.
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Three friends in their twenties are trying to do the impossible – have fun on a casual Friday night.
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A comical story about two brothers living in the countryside and trying to solve problems in their own way. Kris and Otto find themselves in the middle of a caricature reality of countryside lifestyle, no matter what they are doing – trying to support their family, bragging about their egos, entering a gasoline venture, or playing music everywhere they go.
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Jaunieši Jēkabs, Linda un Rihards bauda romantisku, bohēmas pilnu pavasari. Rīgā plaukst ābeles un nenovēršami tuvojas karš.
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This video has it all: lots of cash, half-naked women, men who exploit the macho image, cityscapes, and cars, new shiny cars. It’s just that it’s also very self-ironic, playing with well-established images and symbols of success and fame. The result is a surprising work of art which leaves you inspired, confused and amused all at the same time. Because riders never die, we just multiply, and that’s exactly what’s going on right here: if you multiply an image enough times, eventually, you might even become that image.
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Nobody knows how to define LOVE. How to describe the feeling of falling in love. Yet, at the same time, LOVE is the most written topic of all. We all think about LOVE and we think about our loved ones. LOVE is an essential element of life and must be interpreted through all mediums, forms and stories. The super-slow motion technique gives a dimension to the story that is highly needed – it is a well-known truth that the world stands still around the person you love.
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Have you ever swam in a suit? Or ridden a skateboard on fire? Have you played a game of chess while there’s golden confetti falling from the ceiling? Have you maybe tried drawing on the black board with a chalk in your mouth? No? “Rīgas Modes” offers you a glimpse of all these activities and more, providing the audience with a collection of deeply upsetting, inspiring, unreal and beautiful images which will either make you want to start a new Pinterest board, or drive you mad. Or possibly both.
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It might be a crazy party. It might be an ordinary night at a club, where burning sculptures constitutes a normal evening. It might also be a nightmare, or a dream, depending on your personal taste and comfort zone. Either way, Unity is a wonderful feast for your eyes, with its black-and-white, or cold blue sights and sceneries, which are a true pleasure to look at. Indulge, watch, but don’t touch – it might all turn out to be a complete mirage.
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In this world we tend to think of relationships as something that have a beginning and a potential end. What if we would be robbed of the ability for actual destruction? What if we simply could not run away?
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On a seemingly ordinary night at a grill bar by a highway, nothing outside the ordinary happens. Somebody is drunk and passed out on the table. Some other guests try to get in, but the owner of the place has other plans – he needs to dance. And then, suddenly, clock starts ticking backwards, there is a beam of intense light – and an encounter that could not be called ordinary by any means.
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We start with a close-up, and then, gradually, we start seeing the bigger, the more complex picture. And boy, is this picture indeed complex. Numerous tiny threads start enveloping the musicians, while the music develops more and more threads as well. At some point, you even realize you cannot believe your own eyes, but it’s a good thing – it means every smallest detail is constantly changing.
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A journey of an over modern future wave guy to conquer the virtual reality and reunite with a beyond focused laser-cat-combatant. In order to get there and to open the window he has to get high and get low.
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In this sleepy, sombre world which seems even a tad bit hypnotised even – nobody blinks, nobody moves, life appears in the form of a young, energetic woman. Her body breathes life in these motionless rooms, and sets a stark contrast between her and people, seemingly stuck in time and space. A wonderfully rhythmic performance which is bound to make you want to move, even if you are trapped still.
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A love song video inspired by the classical story of Romeo and Juliet, turned into a personal interpretation. Experimental/non-photo real 3D animation provides a fun clash between classical ‘high art’ text and cartoony, lego like ‘low art’ animation. The strategy typical to pop art, used to provide us with a dreamy and trippy interpretation of a well-known love story.
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The video attempts to point out and ridicule the unsuccessful drug policy in Estonia. The Soviet style and imitations in the video are the keys to unveiling the truth: current drug policies in most western civilizations are extremely outdated and need to be revised. If the leading corporations and politicians do not resolve this problem, the people will take matters into their own hands.
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Some music videos manage to tell quite an epic tale. Like this one, which includes an encounter with the Venezuelan border police, crossing the ocean in a car, and chasing the escaper’s dream on the dunes in Venezuela. An epic tale of bringing one’s dreams to reality, ‘’Į Venesuelą’’ challenges the genre, its conventions, and what we expect from a video in the Baltics. Also, do birches really grow in Venezuela?
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Breathe in, breathe out. Transcend this reality and find yourself in a place where events don’t make much sense and involve a man being strangled with a rope that glows, way too many bloodied people to feel comfortable around them, and a very special pedestal for a mini chair and mini deer horns. Making sense is an arbitrary notion, as long as it’s aesthetically pleasing.
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In distant Lithuania, music is heavily controlled by an oppressive special police force called The Beat Patrol, ensuring the quality of beats and basses all over the country. They search neighbourhoods for people listening to bad music, and deliver violent punishments and instant executions to maintain high standards. If you want to live, make sure you only listen to seriously heavy bass tunes, and never ever play the acoustic guitar in public.
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