SHORT RIGA
As an individual department within this year’s festival the team behind the wittily titled SHORT RIGA have devised a remarkable feat – altogether three competitions of new shorts from around the world, Baltic student films and a separate category for music videos. Showcased within three respective programmes SHORT RIGA will take over the newly established small theater KINO BIZE as well as organise workshops and host an award ceremony.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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