Tabita Rudzāte

A story about Emīlija Benjamiņa, the “queen of the press” in interwar Latvia, whose wealth and tragic fate have since become folklore. The film’s narrative covers the period from the beginnings of Emīlija’s magazine Atpūta (Recreation), to her arrest and slow demise in a train en route to Siberia. The most prominent clairvoyant of the time - Eugene Fink’s prophecy that Emīlija would die from starvation in a foreign land (which served to be true) weaves through the narrative as a red thread. With this strong woman at the centre of the story, the film shows Latvian society in all its richness and gives the audience the opportunity to meet many well-known historical figures.

A miniseries about the events during one summer in a family of a writer who are unexpectedly granted a remote estate with all its unusual inhabitants, and who has to decide what to do with the dilapidated estate. Exciting and comic events in eight episodes in which the future writer Anšlavs Eglītis together with his brother Vidvuds, father Viktors and his wife Hilda Vīka, begin the restoration of the estate, at the same time opening a boarding house, which becomes the intersection and summer stage of the neighbourhood, ghosts of the past, visitors from the city and Latvian intellectuals in Latvia in the 1920s.

In the final years of World War I a retired German field medic is sent to a remote sanatorium for soldiers suffering from post-traumatic mental disorders. There he encounters a strange, dreamlike state of existence that challenges his own war-torn mind.

In 1937, silent film star Maria Leiko travels to USSR upon learning of the birth of her granddaughter. But when she discovers the tragic circumstances of that event, KGB agents persuade her to remain in the country. Leiko abandons her cinema career to instead join Skatuve, the Latvian State Theatre in Moscow. Soon she discovers that she is being manipulated by the government amid its purges of political enemies. As a network of traitors, informers, and NKVD agents surround her, she must choose between family and career, and between her ideals and the lies of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.